Development of circular patch-type electric field sensor for printed circuits.

As a sensor that can measure the signals at around several gigahertz propagating on a printed circuit board, a near-field sensor with a patch antenna configuration is conceived. The tested sensor is the first to measure the electric field component perpendicular to the transmission line dominant near the microstrip line. In the range from 1 to 10 GHz, the signals on the microstrip line can be measured with a variation level of less than 4 dB. In this paper, the effect of the physical shape of the sensor on the characteristics is verified by the FDTD numerical calculations. The effectiveness of the sensor is demonstrated by test fabrication. Since the present sensor has a configuration without a balun, it is possible to increase the operating frequency by selecting the permittivity of the material used for the sensor and by reducing the size. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 87(11): 57–67, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (<URL>www.interscience.wiley.com</URL>). DOI 10.1002/ecja.20143 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]