Methods for the calibrated measurement of the scattering parameters of planar multi-port devices

In this article, the error-corrected determination of complex scattering parameters of multi-port devices by means of a 2-port vector network analyzer is presented. As only two ports of the device under test can be connected to the analyzer ports at a time, the remaining device ports have to be terminated by external reflections. In order to measure the scattering parameters of the DUT without the influence of systematic errors and of the external terminations, an error correction has to be performed besides the calibration. For this purpose, the application of the multi-port procedure is presented. This method has the advantage, that the external reflective terminations can be chosen arbitrarily. Furthermore, these terminations can be unknown except for one. An automatized measurement system based on a switching network is shown, which is optimized for the measurement of planar microwave circuits. An error model for the description of the measurement setup as well as a calibration procedure for the elimination of the systematic errors are presented.