Inverse Design A 3D Printed Four-Port Power Splitter Leveraging Gradient Optimization and Adjoint Method

In this paper, a novel inverse design approach is presented to design and 3D print multiport RF/Microwave devices. The proposed inverse design method integrates the gradient optimization with the adjoint method to calculate and average multiple independent objective functions at each iteration for constructing a desirable multiport S-parameter matrix. To validate the proposed design concept, a prototype is fabricated using 3D printing technology. The simulation and measurement results agree well with each other to demonstrate proposed inverse design approach. This marks the first instance of employing the inverse design method to design a multiport microwave device, subsequently realized through 3D printing technology to enable tailored characteristics and versatility.