Article: The Importance Of EM In RF/Microwave Design Methodology: What's Happening To The Flow?

By Michael Heimlich, PhD, AWR Corporation

An EM (electromagnetic)-empowered design flow with the recognition of EM as a key element enables us to create and utilize tools that restore the proper engineering discipline to the process.

What differentiates an engineer from a scientist or technician, and why do companies tend to hire a lot of our brethren? Engineering methodology. The role of the engineer is to take both first-principles science and hard-won experience and create solutions to problems while quantifying cost, benefit, and risk. In the design phase, we define the parameters in the design that are under our control and explore how these parameters can be manipulated to achieve the design goals, while at the same time trying to quantify costs and risks. For a typical microwave design, some of the parameters we regularly deal with are line widths and lengths, design goals might be gain and output power, an example of cost would be the total area of the design, and a risk would be yield.

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