TABLE OF CONTENTS At the beginning of the book, I said that engineers make poor philosophers and that there would intentionally be no philosophy in this book. By now you have read a fair chunk of this thing and suspect that sometimes I lie. With that said, it is time to plunge into philosophy, to boldly go where everybody else has gone before. And that philosophy is: how to model your circuit.
In a microwave interconnect, there are numerous segments of trace separated by features, passive components, connectors, vias, and such things. Each of these is likely to introduce new degrees of freedom. Each is likely to have an independent range of key parameters that characterize the feature or thing. The simplest simulation is one in which each parameter is set to its typical value, and a single run is made to determine the performance of the link. This is the simplest and always the right place to start. A link that does not work with typical values is broken. The next step is to model with variations of the parameters. Every parameter that is not fixed in value will have a maximum, typical, and minimum value. In most cases, it is not clear which combinations of parameters will result in the overall best or overall worst case. There are various strategies that can be used to try to identify the best or worst cases. One strategy that is often used is to run a large number of Monte...
