Numerical Prepackaging with PMC Lid - Efficient and Simple Design Procedure for Microstrip Circuits Including the Packaging

Journal article, 2012

The paper presents an efficient method for the design of printed microstrip circuit with packaging in mind, referred to as numerical prepackaging with a perfectly magnetic conductive (PMC) lid. The method comprises making the design including the packaging from the start by using a PMC lid, rather than first designing the open-aired circuit; and thereafter, considering the packaging effect and the often required retuning of the circuits themselves. The advantage is that no parallel plate modes can propagate between the perfect electric conductor (PEC) ground plane and the PMC lid plate if the spacing is smaller than an effective quarter of wavelength. This provides a limited computational volume so that the computation time is significantly reduced in the case of the finite element method (FEM) or the finite difference time domain method (FDTD). By using numerical packaging with PMC lid, the ideal PMC lid has to be realized afterwards e.g. by using a lid of nails, which is a minor task as compared to existing approaches.