Identifying Reflections in High Frequency Structures

Abstract

Most of the devices and gadgets that are used daily in our life have electronic circuits that are designed and fabricated on Printed Circuit Boards (PCB). The PCP is an electronic circuit that is used to provide mechanical support and a pathway to the electronic components existing in the device. A collection of electronic components - resistors, transistors, capacitors, etc. - are mounted on the PCB's as integrated Circuits (IC's) or chips and are connected to achieve a common goal. Therefore, the reliability of the information transferred between the chips is very important to guarantee the optimal performance of the device. The data transmission is done with electromagnetic waves traveling through the transmission lines that connect the chips. During this transmission, the waves can encounter parasitic effects causing signal degradation. To be able to obtain accurate and trustworthy designs, precise models are needed that are straight-forward and are able to predict possible causes of the signal degradation and their sources. In this PhD thesis, a model suite is offered that can model unknown structures that operate at radio frequencies and can be modeled as a cascade of transmission lines (to model the delays) tapped with unknown lumped circuits (to model the reflections and other possible parasitic effects). The developed model suite includes three different models, of which the complexity increases with the complexity of the modeled structures. A delay extraction method is used to extract the delays from the structures regardless of their complexity and the estimated delay is integrated into a rational function to provide an accurate model of the structure. In this thesis, the proposed models provide accurate results with a reasonable number of model parameters which are able to detect and model the multiple reflections precisely.

Date of Award	23 Oct 2018
Original language	English
Supervisor	Annick Hubin (Jury), Roger Vounckx (Jury), Gerd Vandersteen (Jury), Daniëlle Van Hoenacker (Jury), Mattias Thorsell (Jury) & Giulio Antonini (Jury)