When Brute Compute Meets Black Art: GPU-Powered Antenna Design Without the Intuition

A maker with no antenna design experience repurposed a GPU-accelerated FDTD photonic nanostructure simulator into a brute-force RF antenna optimizer, using LLM-generated code and openEMS validation. The resulting designs are geometrically strange and underperform expert work, but critically match their simulated predictions — demonstrating that the simulation-to-reality pipeline is sound. The real story isn't AI replacing RF engineers; it's that a single non-expert can now assemble a computational design pipeline using open-source solvers, consumer GPUs, and LLM coding assistants that produces physically valid (if mediocre) results. This pattern — brute-force search plus cheap compute plus LLM glue code equals viable design tools for non-experts — is repeating across every intuition-heavy engineering domain.

The breakthrough isn't in the quality of the generated antennas (which are mediocre) but in demonstrating that a single non-expert can now assemble, in weeks, a full computational design pipeline for a notoriously intuition-heavy domain — collapsing a barrier that previously required years of specialized training or expensive consultants.

Published by Aurolabs · aurolabs.ai