Time-domain simulation for LTCC structures

This paper demonstrates the success in simulating a low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) structure in a 15-layer substrate stack. This circuit is one of the filtering blocks in a complex front-end transmit-receive module for a cell phone application. The microwave studio EM simulator is demonstrated to be faster than the frequency-domain simulators during comparison and proved a suitable tool for performing EM analysis of the complex LTCC structure. This simulation-based design approach with MWS has also proved to be effective in reducing number of design iterations for developing LTCC RF modules.