Section: New Software and Platforms

Dedale-HF

Participant : Fabien Seyfert [corresponding participant] .

Status: Currently under development. A stable version is maintained.

Dedale-HF is a software dedicated to solve exhaustively the coupling matrix synthesis problem in reasonable time for the filtering community. Given a coupling topology, the coupling matrix synthesis problem (C.M. problem for short) consists in finding all possible electromagnetic coupling values between resonators that yield a realization of given filter characteristics. Solving the latter problem is crucial during the design step of a filter in order to derive its physical dimensions as well as during the tuning process where coupling values need to be extracted from frequency measurements (see Figure 3 ).

Dedale-HF consists in two parts: a database of coupling topologies as well as a dedicated predictor-corrector code. Roughly speaking each reference file of the database contains, for a given coupling topology, the complete solution to the C.M. problem associated to particular filtering characteristics. The latter is then used as a starting point for a predictor-corrector integration method that computes the solution to the C.M. corresponding to the user-specified filter characteristics. The reference files are computed off-line using Gröbner basis techniques or numerical techniques based on the exploration of a monodromy group. The use of such continuation techniques, combined with an efficient implementation of the integrator, drastically reduces the computational time.

Access to the database and integrator code is done via the web on http://www-sop.inria.fr/apics/Dedale/WebPages . The software is free of charge for academic research purposes: a registration is however needed in order to access full functionality. Up to now 90 users have registered world wide (mainly: Europe, U.S.A, Canada and China) and 4000 reference files have been downloaded.

A license for this software has been sold end of 2011 to TAS-Espagna, in order to tune filters with topologies having multiple solutions. For this, Dedale-HF teams up with Presto-HF.