Fundamentals of microwave engineering

This chapter reviews fundamentals of microwave engineering and systems, which will be used in the other chapters of this book. It starts from classic passive microwave topics such as transmission lines, S-parameters, the Smith Chart, impedance matching, and power dividers/combiners. Then, active building blocks such as amplifiers, mixers, and oscillators will be discussed. Finally, an overview of basic microwave transceiver system architectures will be given. It should be noted that microwave engineering and systems is based on a large engineering discipline that has gone through many years of development. Therefore, the contents of this chapter only illustrate the basic knowledge set and are aimed to help readers from other fields understand the basic principles. As readers go further into specific radio frequency/microwave healthcare and biosensing topics presented in other chapters of the book, they are encouraged to use the chapter references or contact the chapter authors to obtain relevant information and methods of self-learning on corresponding microwave theory and techniques topics.