RF circuit block modeling via Kriging surrogates

The use of replacement metamodels (global surrogate models) has become commonplace as a cost effective alternative for performing complex high fidelity computer simulations. Due to their compact formulation and negligible evaluation time, global surrogate models are very useful tools for exploring the design space, what-if analysis, optimization, and sensitivity analysis. In addition, multiple surrogate models can be chained together to easily model large scale systems where a direct, fullwave simulation would be too cumbersome. Two crucial aspects of global surrogate modeling are data collection (sequential design) and hyperparameter optimization. Kriging models have become very popular in many domains but have seen little application in electronics and electro-magnetism. In this paper we study the impact of different hyperparameter optimization algorithms and sampling strategies on the accuracy of Kriging models as applied to a low noise amplifier (LNA) RF circuit block.