EC-22.7 Layout at High Frequency, and Designing a Link
You can lay out a controlled-impedance trace and a ground return that work at gigahertz, shield and partition a board so that a transmitter does not deafen its own receiver, and build a link budget that accounts for every loss between two antennas.
This is where the module lands. Everything before it assumed components connected by ideal lines; here the line is copper on a board with a dielectric under it and a connector at the end. The second half joins the module to the rest of the area: a link budget starts at the transmitter's power and ends at the receiver's noise floor, and every figure in it has come from one of the preceding topics.
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Controlled impedance: trace geometry, dielectric and what sets the number
Width, height above the reference plane and the material's permittivity together set a trace's characteristic impedance. Once a board carries high-frequency signals, that number is a manufacturing requirement rather than an afterthought.
NPTEL: Microwave Engineering (IIT Guwahati) · CourseThe return path, and why the current comes back under the trace
At high frequency the return current follows the path of least inductance, which is directly beneath the signal. A gap in the plane under a trace forces a detour and turns the pair into an unintended antenna.
Transitions: connectors, vias and the discontinuity each one adds
Every change of layer or medium is a small mismatch, and a chain of them can dominate the loss of a link. Designing a via transition deliberately, rather than accepting the default, is normal practice above a few gigahertz.
NPTEL: Passive Microwave Circuits, Devices and Measurements (IIT Bhubaneswar) · CoursePartitioning, shielding and keeping a transmitter out of its own receiver
A transmitter can be a hundred million times stronger than the signal its own receiver is trying to hear, on the same board. Physical separation, shields and careful supply filtering are what make the two coexist.
NPTEL: RF Transceiver Design (IIT Roorkee) · CourseThe link budget: from transmitted power to received signal-to-noise ratio
Adding transmitter power and antenna gains and subtracting every loss gives a received power, which compared with the noise floor says whether the link works. It is the calculation that decides whether a system is feasible at all.
NPTEL: RF Transceiver Design (IIT Roorkee) · CourseMargin, and what regulation permits you to radiate
A link designed with no margin fails in rain, in a different building or with a hand near the antenna. What may be transmitted, at what power and in which frequency ranges, is decided by regulation rather than by engineering.
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