Carlos Carceller Candau

Modern communications systems impose stringent requirements on the equipment that operates at microwave frequency, especially in the case of wireless communications. The design of passive components for these applications is contingent upon the availability of accurate electromagnetic (EM) modeling tools that can efficiently handle the complex geometry of these components. Despite the widespread use of mesh-based general-purpose computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools to perform final design verifications, their application during the optimization process is limited. Optimum designs require a large number of simulations, which are computationally expensive when performed by general purpose tools. Instead, microwave designers prefer to employ faster software tools tailored to specific geometries, such as waveguide components, multilayered structures, etc. Therefore, the development of faster and more efficient specialized EM tools has a direct impact on the design of microwave components, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Increasingly complex geometries are modeled more accurately, and may be incorporated into novel designs without penalizing development time and its associated costs. By doing so, passive components become more advanced and are able to fulfill stricter requirements. At the same time, new research and development opportunities arise in order to address the challenges posed by these advanced structures. The present thesis is focused on a specific type of waveguide cavity geometry: bi-dimensional structures of arbitrary shape. Most microwave components based on rectangular waveguides include these elements (bends, T-junctions, tapers, power-dividers, etc.), thus the scope of this work is wide. To characterize these structures, an efficient full-wave modal formulation is developed. Taking into account common properties of bi-dimensional structures, such as its electromagnetic symmetry, the resulting technique is very efficient and accurate. Thanks to the integration of this formulation into a CAE tool, a designer is able to solve complex systems that combine this type of element with components of vastly different shapes. The developed formulation is first applied to the analysis and design of passive components, such as filters, multiplexers and orthomode transducers. These examples are employed to validate the results, as well as to demonstrate the improvement that the proposed analysis technique represents over well-known commercial EM packages. Likewise, this formulation is combined with the tool SPARK3D to predict RF breakdown (multipactor and corona) in selected bi-dimensional structures. Then, novel implementations of waveguide quasi-elliptic filters, based on the interconnection of bi-dimensional cavities, are proposed. Special attention is paid to the realization of multiple transmission zeros (TZs) with tuning-less compact structures. First, a novel family of filters, known as hybrid-folded rectangular waveguide structures, is studied. Simple and flexible methods to prescribe the location of the transmission zeros realized by these structures are presented. Practical aspects related to their physical implementation are also discussed. Secondly, a compact and purely capacitive obstacle, capable of realizing multiple TZs, is presented and discussed. In both cases, multiple examples are given to illustrate the step-by-step process involved in the design of these structures. Finally, a systematic procedure for the design of wideband manifold-coupled multiplexers is proposed. To preven the generation of undesired resonances, stubs that connect the filters to the manifold are removed. Likewise, the manifold length is kept as short as possible. Following a simple procedure, based on analytical formulas and EM simulations, a good starting point for the final optimization of these structures is obtained. It has been applied to a wideband quadruplexer for passive intermodulation measurement at C-band.