Prof. Jin-Fa Lee
ElectroScience Laboratory
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The Ohio State University

Computational Electromagnetics (CEM) techniques, such as FDTD, BEM (or Method of Moments), FEM, are playing increasingly important roles in many electromagnetic applications. In this lecture, I shall first describe the fundamental principles behind the popular CEM methods, and elucidate their corresponding strengths and weaknesses.

The second part of the lecture focuses on how to combine a suite of CEM techniques and couplings of multi-physics modelling to solve challenging real-life engineering applications. Particularly, the following three main topics will be emphasized:

• Full wave solutions of EM radiations and scatterings in the vicinity of large composite platforms (with various thin coatings and exotic metamaterials). The multi-scale nature and fine geometrical features of this application tax significantly on engineering ingenuity. As a consequence, a plethora of novel CEM techniques, including multi-solver DDM, DDM for general integral equations for both PEC and lossy dielectric materials, PDE methods using polyhedral elements instead of conventional brick and tetrahedral elements, and the material homogenization, have been developed to mitigate these technical challenges directly.
• Co-design suite for modelling antenna systems (with front end electronics) and full IC packages taking into account both EM and thermal effects. In many real-life antenna systems, the temperature distributions in the environment as well as within the antennas affect greatly the overall system performance. Moreover, the signal and power integrity analyses for full IC packages usually require considerations of conductor losses, which are in general functions of the temperature. The multi-physics coupling, both in the frequency and time domains, between EM and thermal effects are the main concern in this topic.
• Large land vehicles on lossy rough surfaces, microwave imaging, and modelling 3D rough surface and random multi-layer media for applications in LCDs, organic LEDs. New simulation and modelling techniques are pursued diligently to address this application area, and preliminary results are promising.

Jin-Fa Lee received the B.S. degree from National Taiwan University, in 1982 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1986 and 1989, respectively, all in electrical engineering. From 1988 to 1990, he was with ANSOFT (later acquired by ANSYS) Corp., where he developed several CAD/CAE finite element programs for modeling three-dimensional microwave and millimeter-wave circuits. From 1990 to 1991, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 1991 to 2000, he was with Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He joined the Ohio State University at 2001 where he is currently a Professor in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prof. Lee is an IEEE fellow and is currently serving as an associate editor for IEEE Trans. Antenna Propagation. Also, he is a member of the Board of Directors for Applied Computational Electromagnetic Society (ACES).

Prof. Lee’s main research interests include electromagnetic field theories, antennas, numerical methods and their applications to computational electromagnetics, analyses of numerical methods, fast finite element methods, fast integral equation methods, hybrid methods, domain decomposition methods, and multi-physics simulations and modeling.