Designing a 3-D Printing-Based Channel Emulator with Printable Electromagnetic Materials

This paper explored the possibility of building channel emulators by utilizing fused deposition modeling (FDM) three-dimensional (3-D) printing technology. The FDM 3-D printing provides a rapid and economic method to produce parts with different shapes. An optimizing algorithm was developed for obtaining the printing pattern and loss profile. Parts with different dielectric constants and loss tangents can be printed. Those parts will be placed or directly printed on a low-loss transmission line to modify its transmission or reflection. As a result, different channel emulators can be built to emulate the S-parameter and eye diagrams of a target channel with the advantage of avoiding complicated electronic components and only being limited in the frequency range by the transmission line and attached connectors.