Arbitrary Transmission Line Calculator. / News: Recent posts

Following a reported issue when using multiple dielectrics, a release was made which disabled the use of multiple dielectrics. This is believed to have been solved, so the use of multiple dielectrics has been re-enabled.

'atlc' is a very portable piece of UNIX software for the analysis of transmission lines. 'atlc' has been tested on a very large range of hardware, including of course Linux PCs, but also a Sony Playstation 2 games console and a Cray Y-MP supercomputer!

atlc has been tested on a large number of UNIX systems :-

Debian Linux, Gentoo Linux, Redhat Linux, Suse Linnx, IBM's AIX, Apples's OS X for Mac, HP's HP-UX (both PA-RISC and Itanium), SGI's IRIX, Sun's Solaris, HP's Tru64, Cray's UNICOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD.... read more

The programs making up the package 'atlc' are all Unix command line driven. Would anyone be interested in writing a grapical front end. I'd like this platform independant, so using WxWindows, gtk or similar.

This CAD software now supports the analysis and design of both standard 2-wire transmission lines and directional couplers, with an arbitrary number of dielectrics. Some aspects are CPU intensive so multiple CPUs are supported. MPI support for multiple machines on a network is expected soon.

Recently support for directional couplers has been much extended. Its now possible to desgin couplers, determine the properties of couplers on PCBs, find a microstrip coupler on a PCB that suits your requirments. See http://atlc.sourceforge.net/couplers.html

Now its possible to design a coupler with a given frequency response and coupling factor. For one geometry (coupled striplines) it's possible to quickly find the dimensions of the coupler to meet the required specification. See http://atlc.sourceforge.net/determine_dimensions_of_couplers.html... read more

Support for Directional Couplers.
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This release 4.0.0 is the first release of atlc that supports directional
couplers. Although at present the software only reports on the
odd and even mode impedance Zodd and Zeven, it is possible to calculate
the properties of a coupler with such mode impedances quite easily.

The coupler support is not complete, but it is there for vacuum
dielectrics and calculations against an exact model for thin stripline
couplers indicates an rms error of around 0.6 %. ... read more

The code has been changed slightly so that it compiles (and works) under Windows too. Previoulsy it compiled okay, but some small changes were needed, mainly related to reading binary files in and out. I'm grateful for the help of Randall DuCharme AD5GB for his help with some of that.

The code has been put onto CVS. This is completley new to me and Randall, so some problems are likely to occur. ... read more

The code has been changed slightly so that it compiles (and works)
under Windows too. Previoulsy it compiled okay, but some small
changes were needed, mainly related to reading binary files in and
out. I'm grateful for the help of Randall DuCharme AD5GB for his
help with some of that.

WHILST THE CODE NOW RUNS UNDER WINDOWS, IT WILL NOT BE KEPT
UP TO DATE SO MUCH AS UNDER UNIX.

The code has been put onto CVS. This is completley new to me and
Randall, so some problems are likely to occur. This is
evident that there are three directories ... read more

I've spent quite a bit of time on Sourceforge's really useful 'compile farm', testing atlc and associated programmes. It now compiles and run with no problems on PCs, a Dec Alpha, various Suns, a PowerPC ... etc. It should work on your machine too.

Please let me know of any issues.

Two quite important bugs have been removed for this release.
1) The electric potential is set to zero unless defined otherwide. Before it was set to 0.3 V for some odd reason, which screwed things up a lot.

2) The electric field bitmaps are now a lot more accurate. The programme now checks enforces the fact that the E-field across a conductor is zero. Before this may have not happened within a pixel of the edge of a conductor.