US 6,300,775 B1Granted

Scattering parameter calibration system and method

AssigneeCom Dev Ltd.

InventorsRobert Peach, Nicholas Svensson, Thai Vo

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Abstract

A system and method of calibrating an S parameter measurement instrument (such as a vector network analyzer) in which the number of calibrations required to fully characterize the error model of an n-port system is n/2 calibrations for an even number of ports and (n+1)/2 calibrations for an odd number of ports. Each test port in the system is involved in at least one full calibration, thus n/2 test paths are fully calibrated. For each measured test path, the error terms of the applicable error model are calculated. These error terms are then decoupled from the associated test path into error parameters that are localized to the individual test ports of the test path. Having localized the error parameters, the error model for each test port can then be treated independently from the other test ports. The error terms for the test paths that are not calibrated are then constructed using the localized error parameters for the individual test ports.

Claims31

Dependent claims

A method of calibrating a scattering (S) parameter measurement system to characterize a multi-port device having n ports, wherein n is greater than or equal to 2, and the S parameter measurement system has at least n test ports, the method comprising the steps of:

selecting n/2 test port pairs of the S parameter measurement system by arbitrarily assigning each of the n test ports to at least one of the n/2 test port pairs, wherein each of the n/2 test port pairs is characterized by an error model comprising a plurality of error terms;
conducting an S parameter calibration on each of the n/2 test port pairs and storing the S parameter measurements resulting from the calibrations in a memory associated with the S parameter measurement system;
calculating the error terms of the error model for each of the n/2 test port pairs using the S parameter measurements taken during the calibrations, and storing these error terms in the memory associated with the S parameter measurement system;
decoupling the error terms associated with the n/2 test port pairs into a plurality of constituent error parameters that are local to the n test ports of the n/2 test port pairs, and storing these local error parameters in the memory associated with the S parameter measurement system;
and
constructing an error model for each of the test port pairs that were not selected for calibration in the selecting step using the local error parameters for the n test ports from the decoupling step, and storing the associated error terms in the memory of the S parameter measurement system.

3 more elements

A method of calibrating an S parameter measurement system having n test ports, wherein a test path between any two test ports is characterized by an error model having a plurality of error terms, the method comprising the steps of:

pairing the n test ports to form n/2 test paths, wherein each of the n test ports is included in at least one of the n/2 test paths;
calibrating the n/2 test paths to determine the error terms of the error model for each calibrated test path;
decoupling the error terms of the n/2 test paths into a plurality of constituent error parameters that are localized to one of the test ports in the pair of test ports that comprise each test path;
and
constructing the error terms for the non-calibrated test paths using the local error parameters for each of the test ports in each of the non-calibrated test paths.

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.