Electromagnetic PCB pattern modeling techniques for RF hardware simulation of mobile phones

Various different types of PCB pattern modeling methods for new RF co-simulation technique are presented and applied to wireless phone application. PCB electromagnetic (EM) modeling is essential part of new RF combinational simulation - RF components plus PCB 3D pattern concurrently modeled, however, it takes typically few-hours burdensome modeling time. In this paper, several intermediate forms of PCB modeling methods are evaluated in terms of S-parameters and RF specification such as WCDMA adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) and PCB pattern was pick up from actual mobile phone design in 10-layered FR4 PCB stack-up. Compared to full 3D PCB pattern models, divided pattern model shows competitive accuracy within 0.6~2.0 dBm ACLR average difference and seems to be worthy to replace full PCB pattern models. Experimental data shows that divided pattern modeling technique requires only about 12% of practical full 3D PCB modeling time.