Modeling Coupling through an Electromagnetically Deep Slot Aperture

Metallic enclosures are commonly used to protect electronic circuits against unwanted electromagnetic (EM) interactions. However, these enclosures may be sealed with imperfect mechanical seams or joints. These joints form narrow slots that allow external EM energy to couple into the cavity and then to the internal circuits. This coupled EM energy can severely affect circuit operations, particularly at the cavity resonance frequencies when the cavity has a high Q factor. To model these slots and the corresponding EM coupling, a thin-slot sub-cell model [1] , developed for slots in infinite ground plane and extended to numerical modeling of cavity-backed apertures, was successfully implemented in Sandia’s electromagnetic code EIGER [2] and its next-generation counterpart Gemma [3] . However, this thin-slot model only considers resonances along the length of the slot. At sufficiently high frequencies, the resonances due to the slot depth must also be considered. Currently, slots must be explicitly meshed to capture these depth resonances, which can lead to low-frequency instability (due to electrically small mesh elements). Therefore, a slot sub-cell model that considers resonances in both length and depth is needed to efficiently and accurately capture the slot coupling.