Microwave & RF eBook Downloads
by Dr. Michael Steer, NC State University
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Dr. Michael Steer, Lampe Distinguished Professor of Electrical and computer Engineering at the NC State University, has released half a dozen of his books on RF system and circuit design in the form of OpenAccess eBooks, and are downloadable at no cost on the NC State website. Dr. Steer is a prolific author whose books are chock full of highly useful illustrations and photographs. The first five "Microwave and RF Design" books, volumes 1 through 5, cover a wide swath of ground with concentrations in radio systems, transmission lines, networks, modules, and amplifiers and oscillators. The final book, "Fundamentals of Microwave and RF Design," is a summary of the first five that will prove useful to newcomers in the field.

Excerpts of the books' contents are quoted below.

• Microwave and RF Design: Radio Systems, Volume 1
  • Describes system concepts and provides comprehensive knowledge of RF and microwave systems. The emphasis is on understanding how systems are crafted from many different technologies and concepts.
• Microwave and RF Design: Transmission Lines, Volume 2
  • Transmission line theory and introduces the concepts of forward- and backward-traveling waves. Many examples are included of advanced techniques for analyzing and designing transmission line networks. Describes frequency-dependent transmission line effects and describes the design choices that must be taken to avoid multimoding. Addresses coupled-lines. It is shown how to design coupled-line networks that exploit this distributed effect to realize novel circuit functionality and how to design networks that minimize negative effects.
• Microwave and RF Design: Networks, Volume 3
  • Microwave networks with descriptions based on S-parameters and ABCD matrices, and the representation of reflection and transmission information on polar plots called Smith charts. Microwave measurement and calibration technology are examined. Many of these have lumped-element equivalents and how lumped elements and transmission lines can be combined as a compromise between the high performance of transmission line structures and the compactness of lumped elements. In-depth treatment of matching for maximum power transfer. Both lumped-element and distributed-element matching are presented.
• Microwave and RF Design: Modules, Volume 4
  • Design of systems based on microwave modules. Use of modules has become increasingly important in RF and microwave engineering. Wide variety of RF modules including amplifiers, local oscillators, switches, circulators, isolators, phase detectors, frequency multipliers and dividers, phase-locked loops, and direct digital synthesizers. Wide variety of passive and active modules are available and high-performance systems can be realized cost effectively and with stellar performance by using off-the-shelf modules interconnected using planar transmission lines.
• Microwave and RF Design: Amplifiers and Oscillators, Volume 5
  • Design of amplifiers and oscillators in a way that enables state-of-the-art designs to be developed. Detailed strategies for amplifiers and voltage-controlled oscillators are presented. Design of competitive microwave amplifiers and oscillators are particularly challenging as many trade-offs are required in design, and the design decisions cannot be reduced to a formulaic flow.
• Fundamentals of Microwave and RF Design
  • This book is derived from a multi volume book series with an emphasis in this Fundamentals book being on presenting material, the fundamentals, required to cross the threshold to RF and microwave design. The series itself comprises textbooks for several postgraduate classes and is also a comprehensive reference library on microwave engineering. However the series is too detailed for a first course on microwave engineering. But since The Fundamentals of RF and Microwave Design closely parallels the book series, referencing the book series will be familiar and welcoming.

If (and only if) the hyperlinks provided for the eBooks stop working, send me a note and I will send the PDF files you need to you.

Posted October 7, 2019