Surface-impedance quasi-transverse electromagnetic approach for the efficient calculation of conductor losses in multilayer single and coupled microstrip lines

In this study the authors present a new surface-impedance model for the accurate computation of the effect of metal losses on the parameters of printed microstrip lines. The novelty of the authors´ approach lies in the fast and direct calculation of the tangential magnetic fields above and below the strip conductors, which allows us to develop a very efficient quasi-transverse electromagnetic (TEM) solution for the conductor losses of multilayer single or coupled microstrip lines. The overall computational effort of the authors´ method is much less than that required by purely numerical approaches. The accuracy of the method has been verified by comparison with other techniques, including a general-purpose full-wave finite elements method. It is also shown that the proposed method provides better results than other previously surface-impedance approaches.