Modern military systems contain numerous avionics and electronic systems that must perform to very high standards in hostile environments in the presence of numerous potential sources of electromagnetic interference (EMI). On airborne platforms for example, there could be dozens of RF systems radiating and receiving mission critical signals simultaneously over a very wide range of frequencies. Undesired electromagnetic coupling between these systems can easily occur, leading to loss of function of one or more critical systems. In addition to this cosite interference, there is also the potential for EMI due to sources of electromagnetic energy not located on the platform of interest. These sources of external interference could be due to systems operating on nearby platforms such as a high power radar on a ship, or could be due to intentional jamming. In order to ensure maximum likelihood of mission success, modern military platforms must consider the mitigation of cosite and inter-system EMI prior to deployment, whenever subsystems are added or changed, and periodically during the service life of the platform to ensure continued compliance as the equipment ages. Through this proposed effort, we will show how the GPU-based parallelization of EMIT will lead to significant reductions in simulation time, greatly improve the usability of the tool, and make it possible to add higher-fidelity modeling formulations without sacrificing run time or decreasing the efficiency of the cosite engineers.
Benefit: Throughout the commercial and military industries, there is a great need to accurately model interference between RF systems. With exploding commercial wireless markets, increased performance of RF systems, and the ever-crowding frequency spectrum, EMI problems abound. Difficult-to-identify EMI problems can cause commercial companies to lose large amounts of money due to production delays or unsatisfied customers. EMI problems on military systems represent reduced efficiency, downtime for critical missions, and possibly injury or death if an interference event occurs at the wrong time. Both commercial and DoD organizations desire accurate analysis tools that predict interference among RF systems where the dominant coupling path is ATA coupling. The problem facing designers and analysts is that current analysis tools are either too simple, resulting in no prediction of real interference problems or they require a level of circuit detail that is not readily available and cumbersome to employ when rarely available. EMIT allows analysts to study real world EMI problems with a level of sophistication and flexibility not previously available. Given the great need for this type of analysis tool and the innovative models and algorithms proposed here, we believe that the EMIT software will be a great commercial success. The work being proposed for this project will reduce the time required for cosite analysis by taking advantage of massively parallel GPU hardware. The GPU capabilities produced by this project will significantly reduce cosite analysis time, greatly improve the usability of a leading cosite analysis tool, and make it possible to incorporate higher-fidelity modeling formulations without adding to simulation times. All of these capabilities will lead to more accurate and effective EMI analysis and reduce the occurrences of interference between communication systems on Navy platforms.
Keywords: parallelization, cosite analysis, Electromagnetic Compatibility, Optimization, Electromagnetic interference, RF Systems, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)
