Case Study: Daimler achieves optimized windscreen glass antenna performance with Altair FEKO

Optimizing the Layout of Passenger Car Glass Antennas

Daimler, the German automotive technology leader, faced the challenge of optimizing multiport passenger-car glass antennas (FM, DAB, RKE, TV) embedded in multilayer windscreens where thin dielectrics, embedded wires and the vehicle body interact electromagnetically. Wanting to move from measurement-driven to simulation-driven development and to efficiently handle many vehicle variants and EMC requirements (CISPR-25), Daimler worked with Altair using FEKO’s windscreen analysis capabilities and a multiport approach to address complex multilayer glass modeling and variant testing.

Altair (via Altair ProductDesign) implemented FEKO’s Windscreen Analysis Tool with an analytic multilayer representation, multiport post‑processing, and combined MoM/MLFMM and MoM/MTL workflows so multiple antenna ports and cable configurations could be evaluated in a single simulation without rerunning the solver. The result: mature antenna layouts early in development, repeatable EMC assessments, and measurable performance gains—optimized FM/DAB designs showed up to 8 dB improvement in average gain—and the FEKO-based process became the standard for Daimler windscreen antenna layouts, reducing prototypes and speeding variant management.

Daimler