Affiliations: [a] Faculty of Electronic Engineering of Niš,
University of Niš, Niš, Serbia
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Mirjana T. Perić, Faculty of
Electronic Engineering of Niš, University of Niš, P.O. Box 73,
18000 Niš, Serbia Tel.: +381 1852 9423; Fax: +381 1858 8399; E-mail:
[email protected]
Abstract: The hybrid boundary element method is applied for the calculation of
the characteristic impedance of 2D microstrip lines with a finite width
dielectric layer and with finite width or infinite ground planes. Even though
these forms of microstrips are very typical in practice, they have not been
investigated very often. The basic idea of this method is that an arbitrary
shaped electrode can be replaced by equivalent electrodes, and an arbitrary
shaped boundary surface between any two dielectric layers can be replaced by
discrete equivalent total line charges placed in the air. The discretization
technique is similar to the method of moments and is well known. As a
contribution to the boundary element method, we combine it with the equivalent
electrodes method, creating in that way a new hybrid boundary element method.
This method could be applied to a large variety of very complex 2D problems,
regarding microstrip lines with or without symmetry. The quasi TEM analysis is
applied. We compare values of characteristic impedance obtained applying our
method with the corresponding ones obtained by the finite element method and
values already reported in the literature. Relative error less than 0.5%, fast
convergence of the results and several times shorter computation time comparing
to the time required by finite element method make our method very efficient in
the calculation of parameters of 2D microstrip lines.
Keywords: Boundary element method, characteristic impedance, equivalent electrodes method, finite element method, hybrid boundary element method
