Antenna Toolbox™ provides a catalog of parameterized antenna elements for rapid design and visualization of metal antennas in free space or on dielectric substrates. You can choose different antenna types and modify their geometrical properties, orientation, and feed point. The resulting antenna geometry can be visualized and inspected in 3D.

The catalog of antenna elements includes different types of dipole, monopole, patch, spiral, Yagi-Uda, and horn antennas, among others. You can add backing structures such as reflectors or cavities to any antenna element, and specify dielectric substrates.

Using the Antenna Designer app, you can rapidly choose an antenna that fulfills your specifications. In a few steps, you can design, analyze, and visualize the antenna performance, and iterate until the results match your expectations.

With Antenna Toolbox, you can design your own arbitrary planar (2D) antenna or array. You can combine geometric shapes to define the boundary of the antenna, or you can import the mesh generated with MATLAB^®, Partial Differential Equation Toolbox™, or other CAD tools. After defining the feeding point of the custom antenna, you can use existing analysis functions to compute port, surface, and field properties, or you can integrate the custom antenna in an array.

If you have an existing printed antenna, you can import its geometry starting from a photo, and analyze it with Antenna Toolbox.

You can create and combine geometric shapes for multilayer printed circuit board (PCB) antennas, with arbitrary feed points, vias, and metal and dielectric layers. After selecting the PCB antenna connectors and choosing the manufacturing service, you can write and visualize Gerber files for PCB antenna manufacturing. Antenna Toolbox streamlines the process of designing, analyzing, and fabricating PCB antennas.

With Antenna Toolbox, you can design linear, rectangular, circular, and conformal antenna arrays. You can choose the antenna from the available catalog or use custom elements. You can define the spacing between elements, change the orientation of the antennas, and specify the layout of the array.

To speed up the analysis of large arrays, Antenna Toolbox provides the infinite-array approach, which treats an antenna as a cell repeated infinitely on a regular plane.

Antenna array analysis takes into account mutual coupling among elements of the array. You can determine the correlation between antennas in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, study the effect of closely spaced antennas on the radiation patterns of phased array systems, and evaluate electrical coupling via a multiport S-parameters matrix.

The array analysis results can be used for accurate end-to-end simulation of wireless transceivers from digital baseband to antenna and back, including the effects of the transmission channel. You can use Antenna Toolbox to take into account array gain, directivity, loading, coupling, and other effects introduced by the antennas when simulating radar and wireless communications systems.

Antenna Toolbox uses the method of moments to analyze antenna elements and arrays. You can compute port properties such as impedances, S-parameters, and voltage standing wave ratios (VSWR) to determine the resonance frequency of antennas or to study impedance matching conditions. In MIMO systems, you can estimate and simulate the effects of coupling between antenna elements by computing the multiport S-parameters of the antenna array.

Current and charge distributions on the surface of an antenna can be computed at different frequencies and then visualized. You can also inspect and control the density of the mesh used for the analysis.

The electromagnetic field can be computed at any point in space and at any frequency, and can be visualized in 3D or in 2D over different planes. The far-field radiation pattern can be used to design isolated antennas and antenna arrays, and you can estimate the effects of adjacent structures by computing the array pattern of antenna elements when embedded in an array.

You can excite an antenna with a voltage source at the feed point, or you can solve the receiving antenna problem and compute the scattering solution using a plane wave excitation. You can connect lumped RLC elements to the surface of an antenna to tune it and improve its resonance.

You can explore the design space and optimize antennas and arrays to fulfill system specifications. For example, you can use Optimization Toolbox™ and Global Optimization Toolbox with Antenna Toolbox to design antennas and arrays with optimized patterns and matching characteristics.

Antenna and array analysis results can be used for the accurate end-to-end simulation of wireless transceivers from digital baseband to the antenna and back, including the effects of the transmission channel.

Antenna Toolbox can be used with Phased Array System Toolbox™ and Communications System Toolbox™ for the design of radar and MIMO communications systems. The complex radiation pattern of antenna elements that are isolated or embedded within an array can be applied in the development of beam forming and beam steering algorithms. With Antenna Toolbox, you can estimate the coupling between antenna elements, account for the edge effects of an array, and simulate MIMO channel performance, including antenna correlation.

The impedance and S-parameters of antennas and antenna arrays computed with Antenna Toolbox can be used for the design of matching networks using RF Toolbox™. The effects of the antenna loading on power transfer and signal-to-noise ratio in the RF front end can be incorporated into the simulation of wireless communication systems using RF Blockset™.

With Antenna Toolbox, you can visualize antenna sites for transmitters and receivers, inspect communication links, and compute coverage (signal strength), using propagation models for free space, weather, and more.

You can use map-based visualization tools to analyze different scenarios for radar and base station positioning, while accounting for the Earth’s curvature on interactive geographical maps.