Microwave engineering and antennas

In this week the real hard-core theoretical antenna framework is presented. Starting from Maxwell's equations we will derive the general expression for the radiated fields by any antenna configuration. The framework will be applied to the electric dipole and wire antennas. In addition, your will participate in a workshop that introduces a state-of-the-art antenna design tool.

In this week we will extend our theoretical framework with magnetic sources. In this way, you can use the framework to analyze aperture antennas. We will show this by analyzing horn antennas, reflector antennas and microstrip antennas. We will also show how microstrip antennas can be used to create a phased-array system. We will finalize the week by providing you with some background knowledge in numerical methods. This will help you to understand the underlying principles of numerical electromagnetics used in commercial tools such as ADS and CST.

In this week we will extend the theory on microwave circuits towards active circuits which make use of transistors to realize amplifiers. We will start by introducing the various definitions which are used to describe the gain of an amplifier. As a next step we will present a design methodology for low-noise amplifiers. You will also start with the last part of your design challenge by designing a low-noise amplifier.

In the last week of the course we will dive deeper into the design of microwave amplifiers by exploring by exploring the stability conditions of amplifiers. When stability is secured, the amplifier performance can be further optimized by proper design of the input and output matching circuits. For this purpose the concept of constant-gain circles can be used.