A STUDENT at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey has successfully designed a 35GHz phase shifter using the NI AWR Design Environment.
The challenge was to design a true-time-delay phase shifter with centre frequency at 35 GHz using microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. Because of the large structure, these designs are usually vulnerable to meshing problems, and thus require longer 3D EM simulation times.
In order to estimate and optimise the performance of the complete design in a highly efficient way, the METU student-designer used NI AWR Design Environment/Microwave Office for circuit level simulations that leveraged ANSYS HFSS 3D EM results for key components.
The student-designer designed many of the circuit components in ANSYS HFSS. The designer then imported the simulation results of necessary blocks back into NI AWR Design Environment platform and used Microwave Office circuit design software to design and simulate the complete phase shifter at the circuit level.
The student opted to use NI AWR software for circuit-level simulations due to its simulation speed which shortened the overall design time. Additionally, they could import data files from HFSS for use in circuit-level simulations, the results of which could be easily processed within Microwave Office.
The optimisation feature in Microwave Office software enabled the designer to fine-tune the values of the circuit model of the components for the best performance. Dimensions of the component-level building blocks were subsequently changed in the EM simulation tool according to optimized results from Microwave Office software.