Design-Oriented Two-Stage Surrogate Modeling of Miniaturized Microstrip Circuits With Dimensionality Reduction

Abstract

Contemporary microwave design heavily relies on full-wave electromagnetic (EM) simulation tools. This is especially the case for miniaturized devices where EM cross-coupling effects cannot be adequately accounted for using equivalent network models. Unfortunately, EM analysis incurs considerable computational expenses, which becomes a bottleneck whenever multiple evaluations are required. Common simulation-based design tasks include parametric optimization and uncertainty quantification. These can be accelerated using fast replacement models, among which the data-driven surrogates are the most popular. Notwithstanding, a construction of approximation models for microwave components is hindered by the dimensionality issues as well as high nonlinearity of system characteristics. A partial alleviation of the mentioned difficulties can be achieved with the recently reported performance-driven modeling methods, including the nested kriging framework. Therein, the computational benefits are obtained by appropriate confinement of the surrogate model domain, spanned by a set of pre-optimized reference designs, and by focusing on the parameter space region that contains high quality designs with respect to the considered performance figures. This paper presents a methodology that incorporates the concept of nested kriging and enhances it by explicit dimensionality reduction based on spectral decomposition of the reference design set. Extensive verification studies conducted for a compact rat-race coupler and a three-section impedance matching transformer demonstrate superiority of the presented approach over both the conventional techniques and the nested kriging in terms of modeling accuracy. Design utility of our surrogates is corroborated through application cases studies.