Performance sensitivities of a microstrip amplifier using Adjoint Network method

This work focuses on the performance sensitivities of a wide-band microstrip amplifier along its operation bandwidth using “Adjoint Network and Adjoint Variable” method, via “Wave” approaches, which include sensitivities of the transducer power gain, noise figure, magnitude and phase of the input reflection coefficient. Thus, this work can be considered as an extension of the work in [2] to the performance sensitivities with respect directly to the microstrip width and length. These analytical expressions of the performance sensitivities can be used for the gradient-based efficient optimization, in tolerance and yield analysis of the microstrip amplifiers. Performance sensitivities of the Π-type microstrip amplifier are considered as a worked example. Results of the Π-type amplifier designed for the maximum gain G_Tmax constrained by the minimum noise figure at each operation frequency Fm_in(f) and input VSWR (V_ireq= 1.85) within the frequency range 8-18 GHz are given as compared with the results of the perturbational and Chain Parameter methods. Finally sensitivities of all the microstrip lines of the amplifier are arranged according to the increasing values of the sensitivity measures to be considered in the realization stage.