Soft Computing Methods for Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Design Problems

Book excerpt: The growing commercial market of Microwave/ Millimeter wave industry over the past decade has led to the explosion of interests and opportunities for the design and development of microwave components.The design of most microwave components requires the use of commercially available electromagnetic (EM) simulation tools for their analysis. In the design process, the simulations are carried out by varying the design parameters until the desired response is obtained. The optimization of design parameters by manual searching is a cumbersome and time consuming process. Soft computing methods such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Fuzzy Logic (FL) have been widely used by EM researchers for microwave design since last decade. The aim of these methods is to tolerate imprecision, uncertainty, and approximation to achieve robust and low cost solution in a small time frame. Modeling and optimization are essential parts and powerful tools for the microwave/millimeter wave design. This book deals with the development and use of soft computing methods for tackling challenging design problems in the microwave/millimeter wave domain. The aim in the development of these methods is to obtain the design in small time frame while improving the accuracy of the design for a wide range of applications. To achieve this goal, a few diverse design problems of microwave field, representing varied challenges in the design, such as different microstrip antennas, microwave filters, a microstrip-via and also some critical high power components such as nonlinear tapers and RF-windows are considered as case-study design problems. Different design methodologies are developed for these applications. The presents soft computing methods, their review for microwave/millimeter wave design problems and specific case-study problems to infuse better insight and understanding of the subject.