The Design of a TRL Calibration Kit for Microstrip and its use for Measurement and Modeling of Active and Passive RF Components

Abstract

Microstrip TRL standards for the Thru, Reflect, and Line are designed, fabricated and tested. A split fixture design is built which contains microstrip to coaxial transitions to aid in measuring non-coaxial devices. With this microstrip TRL calibration kit, accurate and repeatable calibrations over a broad frequency range will be verified. This kit is used to measure and model several components such as a capacitor, an inductor, a transistor, and a radio frequency identification tag. The TRL kit allows the reference planes to be set at the device under test and allows novel modeling of the device’s intrinsic and extrinsic parameters through optimization of a network to minimize the difference between S-Parameter measurements taken with the TRL kit and device under test and the proposed model.