Response of variable impedance stripline to pulse excitation

We describe a simple method to predict the transient response of variable impedance stripline to pulse excitation. The method uses a finite difference based, quasi-static impedance formulation to calculate the reflection coefficient at each point along the direction of pulse propagation and the subsequent short pulse behavior of a variable impedance structure. A Fortran computer program is written to determine the quasi-static impedance. Excellent agreement of better than 1% between the finite difference impedance predictions and experimental results is noted. A second computer program is written utilizing previous results but essentially incorporating reflection and transmission from several discontinuities to analyze the transient response of the structure. This transient analysis yields good agreement between predictions and results obtained by means of time domain reflectometry