In this thesis, two separate research topics are undertaken both in the general area
of compact RF/microwave circuit design. The first topic involves characterizing the
parasitic effects and error due to unused post-production tuning bars. Such tuning bars
are used in microwave circuit designs to allow the impedance or length of a microstrip
line to be adjusted after fabrication. In general, the tuning bars are simply patterns of
small, isolated sections of conductor adjacent to the thru line. Changing the impedance
or length of the thru line involves bonding the appropriate tuning bars to the line.
Unneeded tuning bars are simply not removed and left isolated. Ideally, there should be
no coupling between these unused tuning bars and the thru line. Therefore, the unused
tuning bars should have a negligible effect on the circuit??s overall performance. To
nullify the parasitic effects of the tuning bars, conventional wisdom suggests placing the
bars 1.0 to 1.5 substrate heights away from the main line. While successful in the past,
this practice may not result in the most efficient and cost-effective placement of tuning
bars in today??s compact microwave circuits. This thesis facilitates the design of compact
tuning bar configurations with minimum parasitic effects by analyzing the error
attributable to various common tuning bar configurations with a range of parameters and
offset distances. The error is primarily determined through electromagnetic simulations,
and the accuracy of these simulations is verified by experimental results. The second
topic in this thesis involves the design of compact microwave resonators using the
transmission line approach to create negative refractive index metamaterials. A survey
of the major developments and fundamental concepts related to negative refractive index
technology (with focus on the transmission line approach) is given. Following is the
design and measurement of the compact resonators. The resonators are also compared to
their conventional counterparts to demonstrate both compactness and harmonic
suppression.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/2337 |
| Date | 29 August 2005 |
| Creators | Scher, Aaron David |
| Contributors | Chang, Kai |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | 1173638 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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