Fast Assessment of Antenna-PCB Coupling in Mobile Devices: a Macromodeling Approach

This paper presents a fast procedure for the evaluation of electromagnetic coupling between antennas and Printed Circuit Board (PCB) traces on mobile devices. Starting from the geometrical description of the device, a single full-wave simulation is used to compute the electric fields at selected PCB locations. Then, the theory of field-excited transmission lines is used to compute the antenna-induced EMI coupling coefficients at the terminations of an arbitrarily routed PCB trace. The results are finally fed to a rational fitting algorithm for the generation of a broadband SPICE-compatible netlist. This netlist can be used in system-level circuit-based simulations for signal integrity assessments including antenna-induced EMI.