Abstract
Virtual prototyping of RF and microwave circuits plays an important role in the cost-effective and timely development of new products. Although several commercial EM field solvers for extracting the S-parameters or Spice-equivalent circuits for the circuit components are available for fast computation, they are not as accurate as we would desire, at least over a broad span of physical parameters and a wide frequency range. The purpose of this talk is to present a number of techniques for efficient yet accurate modeling of RF and MMIC packages that can be incorporated in CAD tools designed for their virtual prototyping. The techniques include the application of the Genetic algorithm (GA), the Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), and the newly developed Markov and Maxwell (MNM) technique for rapid extraction of S-parameters of a wide variety of microstrip discontinuities.