Overview

Microstrip design has become mature within one researcher generation. Various research groups were established at universities and institutes in the 1960s all over the world headed by visionary scientific pioneers, intensively following the idea to establish a computer based circuit design platform for future mass production of devices and circuits in electrical communications, such as satellite television. We can notice the fruits of intensive research work of numerous scientific groups, having delivered valuable contributions to the development of design software tools, which are indispensable in the daily work of any circuit designer.

Retrospectively, it can be seen that today's commercially available design software has undergone natural selection and fusion, so that only a few have survived. However, it is also observed that new software products continually appear on the surface of the hard-fought market.

The expectation of any circuit designer is that he can rely on the given design software. However, as it is often stated, simulation only can be as good as the device models in the model library of respective software package. This aspect should always be pointed out with less trained and less experienced designers to prevent them from naive applications. The writer has to know many groups, in particular in the high-academic area, that work mainly on the simulation level. This may induce young designers to rely entirely on simulation, having in mind that any computer model is in fact only some kind of approximation of the given complex physical subject. Very often after fabrication,...