There are softwares that are best for simulating planar structures. But which software should be used in the case of planar antennas fed by a bulky network?
Good and popular software packages are CST microwave studio, HFSS from Ansoft, and Empire from IMST.
I would say they are all similarly good - in the end it comes down to how good you set up simulation parameters rather then how good is each package.
I guess it comes down to two things. Firstly, it depends what do you want to do in your simulations. If you want to do wideband stuff it is better to go for CST or Empire which are time domain solvers. In contrast HFSS is frequency domain solver based on FEC and is therefore more suited for "narrowband problems" but it is possibly better there.
Secondly, you should see which one suits best to your budget. They are all similarly priced but it might be that there is a good offer.
PS: people doing interaction with human body (e.g. hyperthermia) often tend to like SemCAD.
Good and popular software packages are CST microwave studio, HFSS from Ansoft, and Empire from IMST.
I would say they are all similarly good - in the end it comes down to how good you set up simulation parameters rather then how good is each package.
I guess it comes down to two things. Firstly, it depends what do you want to do in your simulations. If you want to do wideband stuff it is better to go for CST or Empire which are time domain solvers. In contrast HFSS is frequency domain solver based on FEC and is therefore more suited for "narrowband problems" but it is possibly better there.
Secondly, you should see which one suits best to your budget. They are all similarly priced but it might be that there is a good offer.
PS: people doing interaction with human body (e.g. hyperthermia) often tend to like SemCAD.
I would suggest HFSS, SEMCAD or FEKO. However, as far as ti concerns comercial products, the key issue is their price (and, obviously, availability). As long as you have access to legitimate versions, you can use all of them.
IE3D can be used for circuit analysis. But for much optimization CST and HFSS can be used. HFSS simulation results are obtained faster than CST MWS. But for accuracy, I would recomend you to go for CST....
Acroding to my Knowledge HFSS 15 version is best. Because of it gives more accurate results compare to other software.
Maybe you want to give openEMS a try, It is a free and open source FDTD solver using Matlab (or Octave) as an interface and it has a small GUI for structural review (http://openEMS.de).
There is a tutorial about a microstrip antenna (http://openems.de/index.php/Tutorial:_Simple_Patch_Antenna)
And a Tutorial how to combine circuit and full wave results for a phased patch antenna array (http://openems.de/index.php/Tutorial:_Patch_Antenna_Phased_Array)
Commonly used are the CST Microwave Studio and Ansoft HFSS. I think for arrays HFSS should be preferred because it is based on Finite Element Method (fem), which will provide better results as compared to CST based on Finite Integral Method (FIM).
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