EM-based synthesis and design of bandpass waveguide filters including manufacturing effects with FEST 3D

Abstract

This paper aims at the industry interest on automated design tools able to take into account manufacturing effects. Firstly, an efficient design strategy for bandpass waveguide filters including the rounded corners arising from low-cost manufacturing procedures is presented. This technique is based on a recent enhanced prototype and synthesis methodology able to consider the real structure parts. Using the resulting EM-based synthesis technique, an excellent structure is extracted which requires, at most, only a slight final EM optimization. Secondly, this paper presents analytical expressions providing error estimates for the different filter performances in terms of manufacturing tolerances. From such expressions, designers can determine the tolerance to be requested for a tuning-less implementation. Moreover, they can also be used to set the convergence criterion for the synthesis procedure. A fully automated design tool of bandpass waveguide filters able to consider manufacturing impairments has been developed and integrated in the commercial EM software tool FEST3D.

Yield-oriented design protocol and equivalent circuit model for W-band E-plane waveguide-to-microstrip transitions

“…The recent development and popularization of 3D EM tools, usually based on Finite Element Method, Method of Moments, Finite Integration Technique, etc, has pushed the designers to the tailored ad‐hoc application of numerical methods, but used in a manner more focused on obtaining the best performance than on getting reliable and repetitive functionality. From this point of view, a Monte Carlo tolerance analysis in complex structures (such as waveguides or transitions) has a great importance to obtain an acceptable performance of the design. Moreover, the availability of simple, but accurate equivalent circuit models of the transitions would be of interest for system designers .…”