Synthesis of planar microwave circuits through aggressive space mapping using commercially available software packages

This article is focused on the practical implementation of a software tool for the synthesis of planar microwave circuits based on aggressive space mapping (ASM), which makes use of commercially available software packages as the core program (MATLAB) and as the electromagnetic (EM) fine model simulation space (Agilent Momentum). All technical details related to the control of the cited EM commercial software tool, by means of a general purpose and user-friendly environment (MATLAB in our case), are discussed in detail. The new synthesis tool has been designed to cope with the automatic layout generation of planar metamaterial structures, which is a novel practical application of the ASM algorithm. More specifically, the automated synthesis of microstrip lines loaded with complementary split ring resonators has been considered in this work. However, this synthesis tool can be easily customized to deal with the design of many other planar structures. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.