Prediction of the End-to-End Performance of a Microwave/RF Link by Means of Nonlinear/Electromagnetic Co-Simulation

This paper describes the simulation of a microwave link from the transmitter to the receiver intermediate-frequency ports, by means of a rigorous circuit-level nonlinear analysis approach coupled with the electromagnetic characterization of the transmitter and receiver front-ends. This includes a full electromagnetic computation of the radiated far field which is used to establish the connection between transmitter and receiver. Digitally modulated radio-frequency drive is treated by a modulation-oriented harmonic-balance method based on Krylov-subspace model-order reduction to allow the handling of large-size front-ends. An artificial neural network model is then developed to allow fast computation of the link driven by long sequences of the order of millions of samples. In this way, a meaningful evaluation of such link performance aspects as the bit-error rate becomes possible at the circuit level