Characterization of Printed Transmission Lines at High Frequencies, Software Tool (MATLAB tool) (MATLAB tool)

The objective of this project is to develop a freely accessible software-tool capable of accurately analyzing the most widely used transmission lines in terms of characteristic impedance, effective dielectric constant and losses. These losses are composed out of conductor losses, dielectric losses and radiation losses due to space- and surface-wave excitation. A front-end designer willing to carry out a detailed analysis of printed transmission lines, where the transverse dimensions become significant in terms of the wavelength (i.e. typically with a frequency higher than 50GHz), will be obliged to resort to the use of full-wave simulations as no analytical tools and only few equivalent formulas can estimate interesting phenomena such as surface-wave excitation, radiation and superconductivity. This software-tool, developed with MATLAB, allows for a quick evaluation of these interesting phenomena. The model follows a quasi-analytical approach and makes use of the transmission line formalism. The quasi-analytical model used in this software-tool is described in the paper submitted for The 9th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation, held in Lisbon, Portugal, on 12-17 April 2015 [1] and more rigorously described in the MSc-thesis of Sven van Berkel which can be found here in the repository of Delft University of Technology.

The software-tool allows for four possible stratifications: two infinite dielectrics (in order to simulate dielectric lenses for example) and two finite slabs. The tool restricts the height of the dielectric slabs to half a wavelength, including a possible first surface-wave in the stratification. In the MSc-thesis it is shown that when the electrical height of a dielectric slab is half a wavelength, losses associated to surface-wave excitation are already comparable with losses due to direct radiation into an infinite dielectric. Therefore, when a dielectric slab is larger than half a wavelength, it can be modeled as an infinite dielectric.

The software tool is developed using MATLAB R2013b on a Windows 7 64-bit operating system. The software-tool does not require a MATLAB installation or license; it is a stand-alone version and will download all required libraries and runtime engines when installed.

Download Version 3.0

[1] S. van Berkel, A. Garufo, A. Endo, N. LLombart, and A. Neto, "Characterization of printed transmission lines at high frequencies," in The 9th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP 2015), (Lisbon, Portugal), Apr. 2015.