School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Electrical Engineering Department

A New Technique for the Analysis of the Dispersion

Characteristics of Microstrip Lines
Sana Ilyas, Amna Kamran
EE-841 Electromagnetic Theory

Abstract In this method, singular integral equation technique The geometry of the microstrip line to be analyzed is
has been used for the solution of dispersion characteristics of shown below:
microstrip lines. The method uses eigenvalue equation with a 2x2
matric with high convergence of the solution and extraction of
higher order modal solutions are much easier. The numerical
results used in the previous conventional techniques employed
method of moments which in addition to being complex provided
convergence at a slow rate and the size of matrices was quite
large.

I. INTRODUCTION
Figure 1. Cross section of shielded microstrip lines
Microstrip is a type of electrical transmission line which is
most popular structure used for RF design and product The shielded microstrip consists of air and a dielectric region.
development due to easy fabrication and complete exposure In the center, there is a conducting strip of length 2t. The total
for troubleshooting. High dielectric substrate will have very length of the strip is 2L. At y=d, there is a discontinuity of a
less RF circuit size which helps concentrate energy between
transitioning dielectric to air region.
trace and ground. It consists of a conducting strip separated
from a ground plane by a dielectric layer known as the
Singular integral approach has been used in this
substrate.
The effective dielectric constant (and therefore phase paper that is solved with the help of certain well-known
velocity and characteristic impedance) of microstrip is a slight functions. The following steps shall be followed:
function of frequency. The dielectric regions below and above
the waveguide are different therefore the phase velocities are 1) Write electric and magnetic fields in both regions in
different leading to dispersion that refers to the property of terms of hybrid modes.
microwave transmission lines that have different group 2) Continuity equation will be applied at the discontinuity
velocity versus frequency (non-TEM). The increasing use of for |x|>t and boundary conditions for PEC at |x|<t.
microstrip lines at microwave frequencies has recently created 3) Real equations will be transformed to a set of auxiliary
considerable interest in the study of dispersion characteristics equations using certain well-known methods that will
of these lines.
eventually solve the singular integral equation.
A number of techniques have been in use for the
4) The final determinantal equation is a simple 2x2 matrix
calculation of dispersion effects of which one was done by
Gopinath and Hornsby who used finite difference method as that is ultimately solved for wavenumber as a function
well as minimization techniques for deriving the dispersion of the free space wavenumber.
relations. Another one included the method used by Zysman
and Varon in which they formulated the problem in terms of For even symmetric case, E and H fields are written for both
homogenous, coupled integral equations which were TM and TE cases in terms of scalar potentials and .
transformed into a matrix equation. The matrix size in both The fields for TM case are given below:
these methods was quite large and the computation was
complex and the convergence of solution was time consuming.
In the following sections, this report discusses some
conventional techniques along with the technique developed in
this paper and their comparison.

II. FORMULATION TE fields are given below:

EE841- Electromagnetic Theory Project Report 2017

School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Electrical Engineering Department

The scalar potentials are defined as follows:

For solving these equations we set them equal to two defined

functions and .

After substituting these values in equation 1 and 2, we will get

the following reduced results:

where ,

and . The boundary

conditions applied are as follows: n=1,2,.. for both equations and the value of coefficients are:

After writing fields in terms of scalar potentials and applying

the boundary conditions, we have the following results:

The final determinantal equation is given below is achieved

after substituting values of all the coefficients:

This equations shows that there will be dispersion as beta is a

function of the wavenumber which depends on frequency.
The values of the constants in the equations above have been
provided in references at the end. IV. RESULTS AND COMPARISON

III. TRANSFORMATION TO AUXILIARY EQUATIONS

Differentiating with respect to x and rearranging the equations

by equating the common values we get the following results:

EE841- Electromagnetic Theory Project Report 2017

School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Electrical Engineering Department
This paper shows a new technique for calculating the
dispersion characteristics of microstrip line which involves
complex mathematical analysis, derivations and lengthy
formulas are applied however it is a speedy method as it uses
only a 2x2 matrix in comparison with the old conventional
techniques that used above 100x100 matrices and arrived at
the same results. Another utility is that the number of modes
are also found out by the graph. The field effect at the edges
are automatically being catered for in this method that were
not present in the previous techniques.

Figure 2. Plot showing variation of D(B) REFERENCES

The function plotted as a function of depends on
structural and operating parameters of microstrip line. The
above graph indicates that the number of modes are equal to
the number of zero crossings and as the frequency increases,
there are more number of crossings and hence more dispersion
due to large number of modes.
Figure 3. Comparison
This graph clearly indicates that the method employed in this
paper has such superior convergence in comparison with those
employed in the previous conventional techniques. There isnt
much difference between the values obtained in those methods
with the values obtained in this method.
V. CONCLUSION
[1] G. 1. Zysman and D. Varon, Wave propagation in microstrip
transmission lines, presented at the Int. Microwave Symposium,
Dallas, Tex., May 1969, session MAM-I-1.
[2] J. S. Hornsby and A. Gopinath, Fourier analysis of a dielectric
loaded waveguide with a microstrip line, Electron. Lett. vol. 5, June
12, 1969: pp. 265-267.
[3] R, Mittra and T. Itoh, Charge and potential
distributions in
shielded striplines, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory
Tech., vol. MTT-18, Mar. 1970, pp. 149-156.
[4] http://www.rfwireless-world.com/Articles/microstrip-
line.html
[5]
http://www.setit.rnu.tn/last_edition/setit2009/Electronic
s/114.pdf
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_integral
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_transform
[8] New Technique for the Analysis of the Dispersion
Characteristics of Microstrip Lines RAJ MITTRA, FELLOW,
IEEE, AND TATSUO ITOH, MEMBER, IEEE.
[9] Numerical analysis of a dielectric-loaded waveguide with a
microstrip lineFinite-difference methods, IEEE Trans. Microwave
Theory Tech., vol. MTT-17, Sept. 1969, pp. 684690.
[10] P. Silvester, TEM wave properties of microstrip transmission
lines, Proc. Inst. Elec. Eng. (London), vol. 115, Jan. 1968, pp.
[11] Numerical analysis of a dielectric-loaded waveguide with a
microstrip linePart II: Fourier series methods, Computing
Laboratory, University College of North Wales, Bangor, Caerns,
United Kingdom, Tech. Rep., July 1969.
[12] The use of singular integral equations in the
solution of waveguide problems, in Advances in
Microwaves, VO1. 1, L. Young, Ed. New York: Academic
Press, 1966, pp. 212-284.

EE841- Electromagnetic Theory Project Report 2017