Enhanced Defect Detection in RF Circuits Using DM-SRM and Elastic Regularization Techniques

This article presents a defect detection method for diagnosing pseudo soldering problems in radio frequency (RF) circuit components. The algorithm integrates the source reconstruction method with the difference method (DM-SRM) to reconstruct the source distribution pinpointing the defect location effectively. Initially, the algorithm utilizes the difference between the radiated fields of the intact device and the defective one as input for the SRM. Subsequently, leveraging prior information regarding the sparsity of defects, the algorithm utilizes elastic regularization to address the ill-conditioned problems inherent in the SRM, thereby enhancing its noise robustness. The proposed method’s effectiveness and robustness are demonstrated through simulations on patch antennas and measurements using a near-field system for a microstrip power divider and a low-noise amplifier (LNA).