Nuno Borges Carvalho
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Teaching and learning how to design microwaves and RF circuits usually differs from these activities for other electrical circuit designs. Studying electromagnetic courses can be very cumbersome, but we can make it easy, and one of the people who made it easy was Phillip Hagar Smith, who created a visual tool that allows a graphical representation of impedances in a multivariate graph. It is curious that Mizuhashi Tosaku also made a similar graph independently, but the graph became known as the Smith chart, for Phillip H. Smith.
The Smith chart combines everything you need to design high-frequency circuits, allowing you to understand what is happening in your circuit. Some will advise that you no longer need the Smith chart since all CAD/computer-aided engineering simulators can do that for you, which is similar to saying that ChatGPT will substitute all of our reading and understanding of fundamentals.
This is the reason why the Smith chart is also used to interpret data on electronic design automation tools. This is an opportunity to quickly understand what is happening in our circuit and how to design easily improved and better circuits, including filters, matching networks, antennas, and other key RF components.
This is one of the reasons why the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S) Education Committee revived the Smith chart by creating a high-quality version (https://mtt.org/smith-chart/) that can be printed and used in any classroom or laboratory not only to help students learn the concepts of electromagnetic circuit designs but also to improve their understanding of the basic concepts used in microwave circuits (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The Smith chart: (a) impedance and (b) admittance versions.
This is, in fact, a major aid for professors, who usually need access to a high-quality printed Smith chart; it is now available freely to all educators.
The Smith chart, combined with the MTT-S and a microwave kit, is a great tool for educators worldwide. The Education Committee is working with our large number of volunteers on a group of activities for undergraduate and graduate students, allowing them to bring circuit design all over the world, even to laboratories where a vector network analyzer (VNA) is hard to get.
The VNA is also an asset that is key for students and engineers to understand the microwave circuit arena, and the MTT-S is working on a way to bring VNAs to all of our Student Chapters, to improve students’ understanding and to stimulate them to easily create innovative circuits in their labs.
The MTT-S education initiative has been discussed with several Chapters around the world. One of the examples was the May trip of our MTT-S colleagues to South America, where microwaves were promoted in all their aspects, along with a fundamental understanding of electromagnetics, circuit development, and system integration. Figure 2 shows participants of the MTT-S leadership visit to Brazil’s University of Campinas and the University of Brasilia. Figure 3 shows photos of the MTT-S visit to La Plata University in Argentina and the University of Santiago, Chile, in Chile.
Figure 2. MTT-S members on visit to Campinas University and Brasilia University in Brazil.
Figure 3. MTT-S members on visit to La Plata University in Argentina and University of Santiago, Chile, in Chile.
These visits can help increase the number of engineers interested in microwaves and start a community to discuss different approaches to our field in all of these areas.
I encourage you to visit our website (https://www.mtt.org) for more information about the MTT-S and volunteer opportunities.
Nuno Borges Carvalho (nbcarvalho@ua.pt), 2023 MTT-S president, is with the Department of Electronics, Telecommunications, and Informatics, University of Aveiro, Aveiro 3810-193 Portugal.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MMM.2023.3284709