An investigation of grounding techniques in microwave amplifiers

The current revolution in wireless communications has created a critical need for engineering graduates in this field, and has sparked renewed interest in RF/microwave circuits and systems courses. The University of Hawaii has developed a discovery-based, graduate-level laboratory course in active microwave electronics that has several distinguishing features compared to conventional graduate-level microwave courses: (1) instead of a traditional lecture format, the course is taught in studio mode, in which all student activities take place in a research laboratory that has separate stations for computer-aided design, fabrication, and measurement; (2) the instructor provides minimal guidance to the students, and instead relies on group discussions to elicit critical design methodologies; (3) the design projects are not typical canned experiments, but rather open-ended projects that emphasize self discovery. We present one of the projects from this course. Each student was given the mission of designing, fabricating, measuring, and modeling a 10-GHz maximum-gain amplifier. While seemingly a straightforward objective, the students found many obstacles along the way that provided invaluable opportunities for self discovery.