Abstract
A microwave sensor realized in monolithic technology, intended for permittivity estimation with the use of a highly sensitive coupled-line section, is presented in this paper. It also contains a dedicated measurement circuitry realized as a five-port correlator, therefore, a simple scalar power measurement can be utilized to obtain vector signal corresponding to the measured material without the usage of an external vector network analyzer. To suppress systematic measurement errors arising from the manufactured circuit’s imperfections it is equipped with an integrated calibration block, the parameters of which can be simply tuned with two biasing voltages. The sensor is calibrated following a recently reported procedure, which requires neither known nor specific calibration values, in contrast to other methods with much stronger constraints. It is shown for the first time, that a measurement system incorporating a multiport correlator can be successfully calibrated with such arbitrarily chosen settings of the calibration block. To experimentally validate correctness of the calibration’s convergence, the developed sensor is calibrated multiple times with different sets of the calibration block’s settings, each time resulting in the same output values. It proves that the approach to calibration of measurement systems incorporating the multiport correlator can be significantly simplified with no impact on calibration accuracy. Finally, the measurement of the sensor’s response for two dielectric samples clearly demonstrates the advantages of the utilized calibration.
Highlights
Measurements of materials’ physical properties are of great importance in contemporary both industrial and scientific area
SENSOR DESIGN IN Monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) TECHNOLOGY The proposed sensor has been designed in a monolithic technology, PH25 process based on gallium arsenide (GaAs) offered by United Monolithic Semiconductors (UMS)
In this paper, a new permittivity sensor integrated with the calibration block and a five-port correlator has been presented, and a novel approach to calibration has been proposed
Summary
Measurements of materials’ physical properties are of great importance in contemporary both industrial and scientific area. They can provide accurate measurements of scattering parameters over very wide bandwidth Due to these reasons, in a great majority of reported research on microwave sensors, the vector network analyzer is used to measure the sensor’s response [15]-[17]. For multiport correlators the most common calibration technique is based on the measurement of at least five calibration standards exhibiting unknown, but possible well-distributed phases, and unknown, but equal magnitudes [36]-[38] This technique is relatively straightforward, and mathematically can be brought to derivation of five coefficients describing an ellipse on a complex plane, according to geometrical description of measurement using a multiport reflectometer [39]. For the very first time a calibration of a multiport correlator-based sensor with integrated calibration block is reported, in which unknown calibration standards having different magnitudes and phases are used. The obtained response of the calibrated sensor is close to the corresponding measurements performed with a vector network analyzer
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