Accurate de-embedding procedure for characterizing discontinuities

Various de-embedding procedures exist for characterizing passive lossless devices where radiation does not play a major role. However, for open structures where higher-order, leaky-wave modes are known to exist, or for discontinuity problems where complex modes are known to exist, one may wonder about the utilization of conventional de-embedding schemes which do not account for power loss due to radiation when transferring planes of references. In this article, the Matrix Pencil Approach is presented as a novel and accurate de-embedding procedure. In this procedure, the s-parameters are computed directly without requiring specific values for the characteristic impedance. This is because, in this procedure, the results are automatically normalized with respect to the characteristic impedances of the ports at the frequency of computation. Also, the lines need not be terminated in their characteristic impedances, z_o, to evaluate the s-parameters. Numerical results are presented to illustrate this Matrix Pencil Approach.