Physics-based surrogates for low-cost modeling of microwave structures

Abstract

High-fidelity electromagnetic (EM) simulation is a very accurate but computationally expensive way of evaluating the performance of microwave structures. In many situations, it has to be done multiple times when conducting various design tasks, such as parametric optimization or statistical analysis. Fast and accurate models, so-called surrogates, are therefore indispensable in contemporary microwave engineering. The most popular way of creating such models is by approximation of sampled EM-simulation data using, for example, low-order polynomials, support vector regression or neural networks. Unfortunately, initial cost of creating such models may be extremely high because of a large number of samples necessary to ensure reasonable accuracy. An alternative approach is to use physics-based models, where the surrogate is created by correcting an auxiliary low-fidelity model, e.g., equivalent circuit. In this paper, we review several modeling techniques exploiting this idea, including some variations of space mapping as well as shape-preserving response prediction. Our considerations are illustrated using examples of typical microwave components such as filters and antennas.