RF/MICROWAVE DESIGN
Managing The Challenges
in RF/MICROWAVE DESIGNS
Because of the growth in mixed-technology products, designers often
can’t use traditional PCB layout tools for RF, and RF tools won’t work
with non-RF circuits. So what’s the solution? by PER VIKLUND
Not long ago, a cell phone was a cell phone and a car sound
system was just a car sound system. Today, the sound system
and the cell phone are integrated via a Bluetooth RF link to
provide built in hands-free functionality. More traditionally
“pure” RF or analog/digital products are integrated system
designs, with RF systems embedded as “system on board,”
and all technologies sharing a rapidly shrinking board space.
This is true not only for consumer products, but for defense
and aerospace applications and all varieties of designs.
Anyone who has placed a cell phone close to an office
phone or a sound system is aware of how easily unwanted RF
energy can be coupled into other systems. If a cell phone
three feet away from another system can ruin that system’s
performance, how can RF circuits be placed on the same
board as other circuits? For one thing, it leads to a com-
pletely new set of design requirements. And managing RF
system design – which very much includes managing
EMI/EMC – has become a critical focus area.
But performing RF design in a traditional CAD environ-
ment causes severe pain. And at the same time, specialized
RF design tools cannot be used as the sole solution, because
most RF circuits must coexist with substantial sections of
digital/analog technology. Moreover, the interdependent
challenges involved have made the design of RF system
boards a slow and highly iterative process. This is unaccept-
able, and there is a strong focus on streamlining the process
with tools that understand the characteristics of RF and that
supply automation in critical areas.
There are a number of separate tasks to manage, each
with its own issues. These include:
■ Design the RF circuitry and layout.
■ Instantiate the RF circuitry in schematic and layout.
■ Isolate/separate RF from non-RF circuitry.
■ Manage power and grounds.
■ Analyze couplings and parasitics.
26 PRINTED CIRCUIT DESIGN & MANUFACTURE
■ Design rule check (DRC).
To facilitate effective RF design, layout tool functionality
is extended with drafting, snapping and align features more
commonly found in mechanical design systems. Without
them, RF design becomes a painfully slow task.
For many types of designs, a strictly schematic-driven
flow is optimal. But since RF design is a very iterative
process, with the circuit often being designed as it’s being laid
out on the board, a schematic-driven flow is not always best.
On top of that, purely layout-driven design is not feasible
either, because we have large non-RF sections in the same
design. The solution often used is a mixed schematic/layout-
driven design flow where non-RF circuits are driven from the
schematic and selected parts of the RF circuitry are designed
bottom-up, directly in the layout tool.
RF interference
With the basic design foundation in place, managing electro-
magnetic interference (EMI) becomes the next major complex-
ity to manage. EMI is all unwanted coupling of signal energy
within a design or between the design and other systems.
After years of high-speed challenges, many designers
have become experienced at controlling crosstalk and achiev-
ing signal integrity. A key to their success is a good under-
standing of how signal currents flow on a board. With a sig-
nal propagating down a trace, there has to be a return
current to form a closed circuit. What we have learned is that
the return path tries to find the way back that has the least
impedance. In a low-speed design this was the same as the
path of least resistance or typically a straight line, but a high-
speed signal will have the path of least inductance, which
typically is right under the trace in the ground plane.
Managing return paths allows designers to control
unwanted coupling and radiation/susceptibility as the
amount of radiation is proportional to the loop area formed
NOVEMBER 2005
 RF/MICROWAVE DESIGN
c
fc =
(s - d)2 εr
FIGURE 1. Formula for calculating pass band center frequency
of a via fence.
by the conductor and its return path. Furthermore, if two
signals share the return path, energy from one signal may be
coupled into the other in the form of common impedance
coupling. So knowing where the return path is, making sure
the loop area is minimized and making sure that two critical
signals don’t share the return path – at the same time – is
always at the back of the high-speed designer’s mind.
With RF circuitry, the signal typically returns by way of
the path of least capacitance. This is a complicating factor, as
it actually may include any conductive surface in reasonable
proximity, such as a neighboring shield box or a metal cabi-
net. For this reason, RF function blocks are kept compact,
with different blocks separated by grounded compartments,
and RF specialists use small capacitors to control RF ground-
ing and return paths. Avoid having a circuit’s input and out-
28 PRINTED CIRCUIT DESIGN & MANUFACTURE
FIGURE 2. Random variance via peppering and contour stitch-
ing can prevent parallel plate excitation.
put stages share a return path, as we otherwise risk causing
enough feedback coupling (from the higher power output
stage to the sensitive input stages) to cause oscillation.
Ground Via Fences
Having created ground shields and ground planes, it is com-
mon to generate arrays (peppering with vias) or fences of vias
(contour stitching) connecting the planes together. Why do
we do this? Often we hear vague explanations like “It will
make the ground better/tighter” or “It will stop RF leaks.”
The real reason for these techniques may not be well
understood. There is little research available, but the includ-
ed references provide some good information.
For all of you RF designers who just pepper with vias
without really knowing why, read on. Because we almost
never have a single ground layer, designers pepper the ground
areas with vias and stitch the edges of ground areas with vias
to avoid coupling. This coupling is due to the parallel ground
planes’ being excited into the so-called parallel plate mode,
letting signals propagate between the two planes. The vias are
shorting the planes together, preventing this propagation
mode in the ground plane.1 Via fences at very high frequen-
cies behave as band pass filters and the via-to-via spacing con-
trols the pass band poles and thereby the cut of frequency of
the filter.2 Hence the via-to-via spacing is very important.
The center frequency of the band pass filter is shown in
FIGURE 1: a function of via diameter, via spacing and dielec-
tric material.1 (εr is the relative permittivity of the dielectric
material; c is the speed of light.)
The center frequency is not the same as the usable upper
limit. The space enclosed by four via holes is cavity that res-
onates at about 0.65 times the center frequency, and we have
to keep our RF frequencies out of that region.1 In other
words, how we insert the vias, their pitch and diameter have
a great impact on their effectiveness at preventing unwanted
coupling in our design.
This leads to how the ground vias are to be inserted in the
layout. Manually inserting many thousands of ground vias,
only to move them when the design is to be changed, is not a
feasible solution. On the other hand, this is precisely what
EDA tools are for: providing design automation. With rou-
tines that can trace objects and automatically insert multiple
row via fences, understanding the boundaries of a ground fill
and peppering its surface with ground-assigned vias saves
NOVEMBER 2005
 RF/MICROWAVE DESIGN
tremendous time. By recognizing the
resonance effects from ground vias,
one can let the tool apply a random
variance to the via pattern to avoid
having all via-formed cavities resonat-
ing at the same frequency.
FIGURE 2 shows a contour stitching
and a surface via pepper with random
variance applied. Although these vias
also form cavities, the cavity sizes are
randomly different, giving different
resonance frequencies for every little
section of the planes.
At this point we have the circuit
under control but are still missing a
critical part: power supply. In the old
days, RF compartments were closed
metal cabinets connected to ground.
Every signal and power source entering
or leaving such a compartment was
passed through a feed-through capaci-
tor, basically a conductor with a coaxi-
al capacitance grounded to trap any RF
that tried to escape. RF chokes, typical-
ly one quarter wavelength of wire
wound as a coil, were connected in seri-
al to further limit RF leaks. Needless to
say, this was a very expensive way to
build; today’s integrated board com-
partments are much more practical.
However, now we can’t use feed-
through capacitors, which theoretically
provide an almost perfect decoupling
with low inductance, and we need to
decouple interconnects more carefully
to prevent RF leaks via power and low-
30 PRINTED CIRCUIT DESIGN & MANUFACTURE
frequency lines in the design.
With the RF section designed on a
mixed technology board, it becomes
important to be able to analyze whether
non-RF structures in the design have a
negative impact on the RF structures
and vice versa. The RF circuit may or
may not originate from an RF design
and simulation tool. But no matter
what, there is now a need to define
regions around the RF circuits, includ-
ing surrounding non-RF circuitry, and
send the entire region into the RF
analysis tools for a detailed analysis.
Because of this, the integration
requirements between layout tools and
analysis tools have increased dramati-
cally. With an analysis tool link that
preserves model and parameter data
through a tool round-trip and still
allows inclusion of non-RF board fea-
tures, the RF engineer can verify the
design without using the very slow
manual modeling process.
DRC For RF
Why is DRC a naughty word in RF
design? In many aspects, this is where
using traditional PCB layout tools for RF
design becomes painful. If the design only
contained a bit of RF, a skilled RF design-
er would scrutinize the layout manually
and make sure all is well. But today’s RF
designs have not only very complex and
large RF sections but also large sections of
analog and digital circuits.
We can safely say that signals
behave very differently in the RF world
than they do in the not-so-high-fre-
quency world: With RF, the signal
wavelength in relation to the length of
the conductors on the circuit board is
such that resonance and standing waves
can occur. This fact is used to generate
passive RF components as metal pat-
terns on the board. These metal pat-
terns connect to each other, and often
to the ground, to form an RF circuit. To
a classic analog digital design system,
this would all look like a massive short-
circuit. To make matters even worse,
with a large number of nets shorted to
ground, it’s common that the remaining
nets cannot be properly DRCed either,
leaving us with a complex design that
cannot be checked.
On the other hand, we cannot just
pretend that the RF elements are non-
conductive, because we need DRC to
verify that the RF components also are
properly connected to each other. The
solution is to use a design system that can
differentiate between RF structures and
non-RF structures and provide DRCs
that makes sense in each discipline.
Following the paradigm that every
time you succeed in doing a design, the
next one will be much worse, we can
count on more integrated RF, more
complex RF modules and with much
higher frequencies making it even hard-
er to control return paths and coupling.
The future of RF/microwave design
will no doubt be harsh, but exciting. PCD&M
PER VIKLUND is a product marketing
manager at Mentor Graphics. He is
responsible for RF, embedded compo-
nents and advanced packaging solu-
tions. Viklund can be reached at
per_viklund@mentor.com.
REFERENCES
1. Takeshi Yuasa, Tamotsu Nishino, and
Hideyuki Oh-hashi, ”Simple Design Formu-
la for Parallel Plate Mode Suppression by
Ground Via-Holes in Multi-Layered Pack-
ages,” Mitsubishi Electric Corp., May 2001,
Ofuna, Kamakura, Kanagawa, Japan.
2. Thorsten Tischler, Matthias Rudolph,
Andreas Kilk, and Wolfgang Heinrich, ”Via
Arrays for Grounding in Multilayer Packag-
ing – Frequency Limits and Design Rules,”
Ferdinand-Braun-Institut für Höchstfre-
quenztechnik, Berlin, Germany.
NOVEMBER 2005