we see that the forward voltage represents the voltage at port 1 in the case where the termination is Z0. From this and Eq. (1.4), one finds that the reverse voltage must be
If the transmission line in Figure 1.1 is long (such that the load effect is not noticeable) and the line impedance at the reference point is the same as the source, which may be called the port reference impedance, then the instantaneous current going into the transmission line is
(1.10)
The voltage at that point is same as the forward voltage and can be found to be
(1.11)
The power delivered to the line (or a Z0 load) is
(1.12)
From these definitions, one can now refer to the incident and reflected power waves using the normalized incident and reflected voltage waves, a and b as (Keysight Technologies 1968).
Or, more formally as a power wave definition
where Eq. (1.14) includes the situation in which Z0 is not pure real (Kurokawa 1965). However, it would be an unusual case to have a complex reference impedance in any practical measurement.
For real values of Z0, one can define the forward or incident power as
Figure 1.2 2‐port network connected to a source and load.
There are now sets of incident and reflected waves at each port i, where
The voltages and currents at each port can now be defined as
(1.16)
where Z0i is the reference impedance for the ith port. An important point here that is often misunderstood is that the reference impedance does not have to be the same as the port impedance or the impedance of the network. It is a “nominal” impedance; that is, it is the impedance that we “name” when we are determining the S‐parameters, but it need not be associated with any impedance in the circuit. Thus, a 50 Ω test system can easily measure and display S‐parameters for a 75 Ω device, referenced to 75 Ω.
The etymology of the term reflected derives from optics and refers to light reflecting off a lens or other object with an index of refraction different from air, whereas it appears that the genesis for the scattering or S‐matrix was derived in the study of particle physics, from the concept of wavelike particles scattering off crystals. In microwave work, scattering or S‐parameters are defined to relate the independent incident waves to the dependent waves; for a 2‐port network they become
which can be placed in matrix form as
(1.18)
where a's represent the incident power at each port, that is, the power flowing into the port, and b's represent the scattered power, that is, the power reflected or emanating from each port. For more than two ports, the matrix can be generalized to
(1.19)
From Eq. (1.17) it is clear that it takes four parameters to relate the incident waves to the reflected waves, but Eq. (1.17) provides only two equations. As a consequence, solving for the S‐parameters of a network requires that at least two sets of linearly independent conditions for a1 and a2 be applied, and the most common set is one where first a2 is set to zero, the resulting b waves are measured, and then a1 is set to zero, and finally a second set of b waves are measured. This yields
which is the most common expression of S‐parameter values as a function of a and b waves, and often the only one given for their definition. However, there is nothing in the definition of S‐parameters that requires one or the other incident signals to be zero, and it would be just as valid to define them in terms of two sets of incident signals, an and