Low-cost yield-driven design of antenna structures using response-variability essential directions and parameter space reduction

Quantifying the effects of fabrication tolerances and uncertainties of other types is fundamental to improve antenna design immunity to limited accuracy of manufacturing procedures and technological spread of material parameters. This is of paramount importance especially for antenna design in the industrial context. Degradation of electrical and field properties due to geometry parameter deviations often manifests itself as, e.g., center frequency shifts or compromised impedance matching. Improving antenna performance at the presence of uncertainties is typically realized through maximization of the fabrication yield. This is normally carried out at the accuracy level of full-wave electromagnetic (EM) analysis, which incurs considerable computational expenses. The involvement of surrogate modeling techniques is the most common approach to alleviating these difficulties, yet conventional modeling methods suffer to a great extent form the curse of dimensionality. This work proposes a technique for low-cost yield optimization of antenna structures. It capitalizes on meticulous definition of the domain of the metamodel constructed for statistical analysis purposes. The domain is spanned by a limited number of essential directions being the most influential in terms of affecting antenna responses in the frequency bands of interest. These directions are determined through an automated decision-making process based on the assessment of the circuit response variability. Our approach permits maintaining small domain volume, which translates into low cost of surrogate model setup, while providing sufficient room for yield improvement. The presented method is validated using three antenna structures and favorably compared to several surrogate-assisted benchmark methods. EM-driven Monte Carlo simulation is also conducted to verify reliability of the yield optimization process.