Model Driven Design and Characterization of Microwave Systems

In the development of the 5G communication technology, there is an exponential increase in applications and devices. The 5G standard brings higher data rates, a lower latency and a higher reliability to the end users, resulting in the need for wore bandwidth. As a result, designers face many challenges to cope with all these demanding specifications. The design of linear as well as nonlinear devices will become more complicated and these is a need for new approaches towards design techniques as well as measurements. We propose a new model-based framework to facilitate the design and characterization of linear as well as nonlinear components.
The first part of this work uses models to improve the design procedure of microwave filters. The time-consuming electromagnetic optimization used in the current design process is replaced in two different ways. First, it is replaced by metamodels, allowing a significant speed-up of the design process while keeping a high accuracy level. In a next stage, an equivalent circuit model is used to provide physical insight into the electromagnetic operation of the structure, which helps a designer to ensure robust and reliable designs.
The second part of this work introduces a measurement procedure based on the Best Linear Approximation model-framework to characterize the nonlinear behavior of a power amplifier. Separate estimates of the linear term, the noise term and the in-band and out-of-band nonlinear distortion allow to extract multiple measurement-based figures of merit with a single measurement taken from a single measurement setup. This approach simplifies the required characterization tests and reduces the testing time significantly.
The proposed modeling techniques can be generalized to the design and characterization of other microwave components. The use of models proves to be a promising way to deal with the challenges that await the designer.