Low-Overhead RF Impedance Measurement Using Periodic Structures

Abstract

Due to the need for higher reliability and performance from RF circuits, multi-port reflectometers are increasingly used as low-overhead impedance monitors. In this work, using periodic structures as multi-ports is proposed. Periodic structures impose a new constraint on the multi-port theory and simplify it significantly. This simplification leads to closed form solution for calibration and measurement procedures. The closed-form solution also shows that any arbitrary periodic structure will always have a unique solution for both procedures. Therefore, the proposed technique does not rely on frequency-dependent behavior of devices, such as directivity and phase shift to measure impedance. This fact leads to increased bandwidth and simplified design procedure. In addition, proposed multi-port structures can be calibrated by using fewer known loads than existing multi-port techniques. This fact, coupled with the closed-form solution, reduces computation overhead and test time. The theory and its robustness against non-idealities, such as part-to-part variation, are verified with Monte-Carlo simulations. A practical embodiment of the technique is demonstrated with EM simulations and hardware experiments. In this embodiment, the multi-port structure is embedded into an LC matching network. Hardware experiments show that the embedded multi-port structure can measure test loads with high accuracy from 1.5 GHz to 3.5 GHz, without degrading matching network performance.