A study on the dispersion relation of periodic structures using commercial simulators

In this work, a comparative study on the modeling of periodic structures with commercial full-wave software is performed. In the first method under consideration, only one unit cell of an arbitrary periodic transmission line is analyzed under even/odd excitation. In this method, the coupling between adjacent unit cells is rigorously accounted for. In the second method of analysis, the propagation characteristics are extracted from the ABCD parameters of the structure with several unit cells. A discussion of the pros and cons of each method is discussed as well as other practical considerations pertaining to the appropriate use of commercial full-wave software tools.