Optimized analysis of slotted substrate integrated waveguides by a method-of-moments mode -matching hybrid approach

International audienceA full-wave hybrid formulation is proposed for the efficient and accurate modeling of substrate integrated waveguides by rigorously accounting for all possible interactions among elements such as vertical metallic or dielectric posts and coupling or radiating slots. The method is specifically accelerated in order to maximize the efficiency of the analysis of common structures. Its flexibility allows for the study of a large class of devices, possibly in stacked-waveguide configurations, and for the characterization of radiated fields and input port parameters

Efficient Computation of the Coupling Between a Vertical Line Source and a Slot

International audienceA novel spectral formulation is proposed here for the coupling integral between a cylindrical wave with arbitrary radial wavenumber and azimuthal dependence, and a slot placed on a plane orthogonal to the wavefront. Such a kind of integral is massively encountered in electromagnetic modeling of stratified structures comprising slots and vertical pins or vias. The twofold spatial integral defining the coupling is transformed into an equivalent onefold spectral integral, the integration path of which is selected to obtain Gaussian decay of the integrand. Both propagating and evanescent cylindrical modes are considered. An arbitrary stratification orthogonal to the slot plane can be considered, as well as an arbitrary current on the slot. Numerical comparisons against the standard spatial approach are shown to validate the new formulation, and its advantage in terms of computation cost is investigated in depth

Fast integral-equation analysis of SIW devices

La demande pour des systèmes RF plus compacts avec des bandes plus larges a poussé l'exploration de bandes toujours plus hautes en fréquence forçant un transfert des technologies existantes et l'invention de nouvelles pour ces bandes. Parmi les principaux obstacles rencontrés dans cet effort, se trouvent le problème du confinement de champ, les pertes diélectriques importantes, et les difficultés d'intégration entre deux systèmes conçus avec une technologie différente. Afin de pallier à ces problèmes, plusieurs nouvelles technologies sont apparues durant ces deux dernières décennies. Une des plus prometteuse est le guide d'onde intégré au substrat (ou SIW pour Substrate Integrated Waveguide). Sa caractéristique principale est la possibilité d'intégrer les guides d'onde dans un substrat, le plus souvent en intégrant des cylindres métalliques ou diélectriques densément disposés, dans un substrat dont les faces, inférieure et supérieure, sont hautement conductrices. Cette technologie offre une liberté sans précédent à la gamme de systèmes pouvant être réalisés. La richesse de possibilités de designs, la robustesse et la solidité des performances ont conduit à un nombre très larges de systèmes SIW, certains d'entre eux trouvant place dans des applications commerciales. L'inconvénient de cette technologie provient du très grand nombre d'élément nécessaire et de la complexité de son agencement. Par conséquent, ils présentent un défi du point de vue d'un concepteur, nécessitant des analyses numériques et des optimisations. Les solveurs les plus couramment utilisés à cette fin sont basés sur la FÉM, la FDTD / FDFD et MoM, ou sur une fusion de plusieurs méthodes. Bien qu'ils soient à la hauteur pour une vaste gamme de structures, les plus rapides et plus précis sont très recherchés. Cette thèse porte sur une méthode numérique hybride adaptée à l'analyse d'une vaste gamme de structures SIW planaires. Elle repose sur une représentation efficace des champs dans des guides d'ondes à parois parallèles, chargés avec des diélectriques planaires simples ou multicouches contenant des cylindres ; elle permet la construction de systèmes linéaires dont les solutions donnent les amplitudes de champ post-dispersion. Ce problème est ce que nous appelons le mode-matching, et fournit des moyens de calcul rapide de champ en présence de cylindres métalliques et diélectriques. Étant donné qu'une part importante de ces dispositifs utilise des fentes rectangulaires étroites comme éléments de couplage et de rayonnement, nous proposons une approche basée sur les MoM pour leur analyse. Grâce à l'application du principe d'équivalence, chaque fente remplacée par des courants magnétiques équivalents; la procédure divise efficacement le problème le plus large en plusieurs plus petits, chacun appartenant à une région délimitée par des plaques PEC parallèles (un seul guide d'ondes à plans parallèles). En exerçant les conditions aux limites sur les surfaces des fentes et en effectuant la pondération Galerkin, on obtient un système linéaire dont les solutions sont les amplitudes des courants magnétiques. De là, nous procédons au calcul des quantités pertinentes telles que les paramètres S, Y et Z. Nous fournissons des critères empiriques pour choisir le nombre de modes / fonctions de base suffisantes pour une grande précision. En outre, nous présentons des techniques d'approximation et montrons comment exploiter les symétries inhérentes à des dispositifs SIW afin d'accélérer encore plus la méthode. Nous présentons les résultats de l'analyse de plusieurs structures SIW, obtenus par notre code en interne sur la base de la méthode exposée ici, et les comparons à ceux obtenus avec un solveur commercial standard. Les résultats obtenus montrent une excellente précision et efficacité de la méthode proposée. Le facteur d'accélération, la robustesse et la généralité en font un outil attrayant pour être utilisé dans la conception et l'optimisation des dispositifs SIW.With constant demand for larger band and more compact RF devices, the rapid shift to higher frequency regions, as high as the W-band (75 to 110 GHz), forces microwave designers to both transfer existing technologies to and invent new ones for these bands. The major obstacles encountered in this endeavour are the problem of efficient field confinement, problematic electrical contacts, high dielectric losses, and difficult integration between devices realized with different technologies, to name a few. To overcome these issues, several competing technologies emerged in the past two decades. One of the most promising is the substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) paradigm. Its key feature is the possibility of integrating waveguides into substrates, most often done by embedding densely-packed metal and dielectric cylinders into substrates bounded by highly-conductive layers, e.g. PCB-type ones. This provides unprecedented freedom in the range of devices that can be realized. Though commonly planar, these devices may have sidewalls of almost arbitrary shape and can be easily integrated with ones realized in alternative technologies, such as the coplanar-waveguide or microstrip technology. The richness in design possibilities, robustness and solid performance has led to a very large number of SIW devices, some of them finding place in commercial applications. Unfortunately, they often comprise a large number of elements and have complex layouts. Hence, they present a challenge from a designer’s perspective, necessitating numerical analysis and optimization. The most common solvers used for that purpose are based on FEM, FDTD/FDFD, and MoM, or merge several methods. Though they are up to the task for a vast range of structures, faster and more accurate ones are highly sought for. This thesis is concerned with a hybrid numerical method suited to the analysis of a vast range of planar SIW structures. It relies on an efficient representation of fields in parallel-plate waveguides, loaded with either single or multi-layer planar dielectrics, containing circular cylindrical posts; it enables the construction of linear systems whose solutions yield post-scattered field amplitudes. This problem is what we refer to as mode-matching, and provides means of fast computation of field in presence of metal and dielectric posts. Since a significant share of such devices use narrow rectangular slots as coupling and radiating elements, we propose an MoM-based approach to their analysis. Through the application of the equivalence principle, each slot replaced by equivalent magnetic currents; the procedure effectively partitions the larger problem into several smaller ones, each pertaining to a region bounded by parallel PEC plates (a single parallel-plate waveguide). Enforcing the boundary conditions at surfaces of slots and performing Galerkin weighting, we obtain a linear system whose solutions are the amplitudes of magnetic currents. From there we proceed to the computation of relevant quantities such as S, Y and Z parameters. We provide empirical criteria for choosing the number of modes/basis functions sufficient for high accuracy. Moreover, we present approximation techniques and show how to exploit symmetries inherent in SIW devices to speed up the method even further. To stress the features rendering our approach advantageous over the alternatives,we compare it to ones found in literature representing what we believe to be the most successful attempts. We present the results of analysis of several SIW structures of varying complexity, obtained by our in-house code based on the method exposed here, and compare them against the ones obtained with a standard commercial solver. The obtained results show excellent accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. The speed-up factor, the robustness and generality make it an attractive tool to be used in design and optimization of SIW devices

Efficient analysis of SIW-based antenna geometries through a rigorous MoM mode-matching approach

International audienceAn efficient full-wave code handling surface-integrated-waveguide based antennas is presented, implementing a hybrid method-of moments and mode-matching approach. Entire-domain basis functions are chosen to minimize the number of unknowns, and an efficient computation of Green functions for large radial distances is granted by means of a radial-transmission-line representation. The mode matching relies on an efficient cylindrical vector wave function expansion of the field. Both the accuracy and the efficiency are largely superior with respect to general-purpose commercial solvers

Polarizing Topics on Twitter in the 2022 United States Elections

Politically polarizing issues are a growing concern around the world, creating divisions along ideological lines, which was also confirmed during the 2022 United States midterm elections. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the results of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections and the topics that were covered during the campaign. A dataset consisting of 52,688 tweets in total was created by collecting tweets of senators, representatives and governors who participated in the elections one month before the start of the elections. Using unsupervised machine learning, topic modeling is built on the collected data and visualized to represent topics. Furthermore, supervised machine learning is used to classify tweets to the corresponding political party, whereas sentiment analysis is carried out in order to detect polarity and subjectivity. Tweets from participating politicians, U.S. states and involved parties were found to correlate with polarizing topics. This study hereby explored the relationship between the topics that were creating a divide between Democrats and Republicans during their campaign and the 2022 U.S. midterm election outcomes. This research found that polarizing topics permeated the Twitter (today known as X) campaign, and that all elections were classified as highly subjective. In the Senate and House elections, this classification analysis showed significant misclassification rates of 21.37% and 24.15%, respectively, indicating that Republican tweets often aligned with traditional Democratic narratives

A Full-Wave Hybrid Method for the Analysis of Multilayered SIW-Based Antennas

International audienceWe propose a fast and accurate full-wave code capable of analyzing electrically large substrate integrated waveguides consisting of stacked parallel-plate waveguides hosting dielectric or metallic posts and coupling and/or radiating slots. Boundary conditions enforced on posts yield scattering amplitudes, while slots are modeled by equivalent magnetic currents, solved by a method of moments. Substantial accelerations are proposed to exploit various symmetries of the structures and to select the optimal number of modes according to the relevant geometrical and physical parameters. The formulation is validated by full-wave simulations with a commercial software and measurement results

Efficient analysis of lossy substrate integrated waveguide structures

International audienc

A full-wave hybrid method for the fast analysis of SIW-based antennas

International audienc

Méthode de raccordement modal pour l'analyse rapide d'antennes SIW

National audienc

Efficient computation of post-slot interactions in complex layered media with vertical interconnects

International audienceWe present here the efficient computation of the integrals expressing the coupling between a cylindrical wave scattered by a vertical post in a layered structure and a slot etched on a metallic plane orthogonal to the post. This integral is required for the analysis of large layered structures with vertical interconnects. The twofold spatial integral is transformed into a single spectral integral. Its integration path is deformed in order to pass through the saddle point of the integrand, and obtain a Gaussian decay on the tail. A reduced number of quadrature points is required, and a significant speed up is achieved for complex structures composed of thousands of posts and slots