Foreign-Developed Electromagnetic Finite-Difference Time-Domain Toolkit

The Electromagnetic Finite-Difference Time-Domain (EmFDTD) toolkit is a robust two-dimensional FDTD simulation package developed by international researchers at the School of Electrical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology. Implementing the standard Yee's FDTD algorithm with staggered grid spatial discretization, this codebase handles electromagnetic wave propagation, scattering, and diffraction phenomena in both homogeneous and non-homogeneous isotropic media for in-plane wave analysis. The implementation excludes support for negative permittivities/permeabilities and dispersive materials, but incorporates configurable boundary condition modules including zero-field, periodic boundaries, and perfectly matched layer (PML) absorbers for domain truncation. The EmFDTD program is particularly optimized for investigating wave propagation and diffraction effects in photonic crystal structures through its customized update equations and field iteration loops. Developed in MATLAB with vectorized operations for computational efficiency, the code has undergone rigorous validation testing across MATLAB 5.0 and subsequent versions. With its comprehensive feature set and intuitive script-based interface, the EmFDTD toolkit serves as an invaluable resource for researchers and engineers studying electromagnetic phenomena in diverse material configurations and structural geometries.