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China/Science
China releases world’s most powerful electronic warfare weapon design software – for free

While similar US industrial software can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, a Chinese program has been released at no cost

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Industrial software for designing electronic warfare weapons has been released for free by Chinese researchers.

Photo: Shutterstock
Stephen Chenin Beijing

Published: 10:00pm, 10 Jan 2025

A powerful industrial software that can be used to design electronic warfare weapons has been released for free by Chinese scientists – and test results suggest it outperforms a US product in both speed and memory usage.

This advance is the culmination of two decades of work that has gone largely unnoticed to the outside world, according to researchers involved in the project.

The electronic warfare equipment used by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is evolving rapidly. For example, the multi-band antenna used in the new phased array radar has “complex structures such as curved surfaces, multilayer dielectrics, metal conductors and thin dielectric layers”, wrote the project team led by Professor Li Bin from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in a paper published in November.

This antenna also produces other complex phenomena during operation, such as vibration and heat generation.

But simulating these types of electromagnetic characteristics on a computer is extremely challenging.

Ansys HFSS, the most powerful electromagnetic industrial software in the United States, takes three hours to perform radiation simulation analysis on the same antenna, according to Li’s team.