Layout-level synthesis of RF inductors and filters in LCP substrates for Wi-Fi applications

A fast and accurate layout-level synthesis and optimization technique for embedded passive RF components and circuits such as inductors and bandpass filters have been presented. The filters are composed of embedded inductors and capacitors in a multilayer liquid crystalline polymer substrate. The proposed approach is based on a combination of segmented lumped-circuit modeling, nonlinear mapping using polynomial functions, artificial neural network-based methods, and circuit-level optimization. Synthesis and optimization results of inductors for spiral/loop designs based on microstrip and stripline configuration are within 5% of data obtained from electromagnetic (EM) simulations. For RF circuits, the methodology has been verified through synthesis of 2.4- and 5.5-GHz bandpass filters with and without transmission zeros. Scalability has been shown over a range of 2-3 and 4-6 GHz, respectively, with bandwidth variation of 0.5%-3% of center frequency. The synthesized models are within 3%-5% of EM simulation data.