92 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 55, NO.

1, JANUARY 2008

Power Waves and Conjugate Matching

Jussi Rahola, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—The concept of power waves gives more natural re-
lations between incident and reflected power in a microwave net-
work than the typically used traveling waves. The reflection coef-
ficient for power waves directly describes the reflection of power
whereas the reflection coefficient of traveling waves describes the
reflection of the waves themselves. In this brief, new physical rea-
soning of power waves is given starting from the principle of con-
jugate matching. In addition, a new formula for the reference im-
pedances for a two-port system is given such that the system is
simultaneously conjugate matched for both ports.
Index Terms—Circuit analysis, impedance matching, scattering
parameters, two-port circuits.
As an example of the use of the power waves, a new formula
for simultaneous conjugate two-port matching is derived. In the
standard approach to two-port conjugate matching, the reflec-
tion coefficients on both sides of a two-port system are nonzero,
but conjugate matched to the load and source reflection coeffi-
cients. In the power-wave approach, the reflection coefficients
will be zero simultaneously and the impedances will be conju-
gate matched, corresponding to the principle of maximal power
transfer.
II. TRAVELING WAVES

I. INTRODUCTION In microwave circuit theory, the standard approach is to use

the so-called traveling waves that are based on the idea of for-

T HE use of the reflection coefficient and the scattering ma-

trix is at the heart of microwave circuit theory. In most text-
books, the reflection coefficient is defined using the so-called
ward and backward traveling voltage and current waves both
having impedances equal to the characteristic impedance of the
transmission line [5], [6].
traveling waves that are the forward and backward traveling In a transmission line with characteristic impedance and
voltage and current waves in a transmission line. This definition propagation constant , the total voltage and current are written
has the fundamental problem that a zero-reflection coefficient as a sum of forward and reflected traveling waves
does not guarantee maximal power transfer from the generator
to the load.
Maximal power transfer is known to occur when the generator
impedance is conjugate matched to the load, a condition which (1)
is generally different from zero reflection. One can therefore say
that the standard definition of the reflection coefficient does not
The total voltage and current are written as
directly characterize the reflection of power. Indeed, it is easy
to compute that the total power carried by a sum of forward
and backward traveling waves is not given by the difference
between forward and backward powers in the case of a complex (2)
characteristic impedance.
To remedy the above situation, the concept of so-called power where the voltage and current amplitudes are related by
waves has been introduced and studied, for example, by Penfield
[1], Youla [2] and Kurokawa [3]. The power waves are math-
ematical constructs which are compatible with the condition (3)
of conjugate matching and give physically satisfying expres-
sions for the total power as a difference of forward and back- With these definitions, the normalized voltage wave amplitudes
ward powers also for complex characteristic impedances. The can be written as
concept of power waves is used by the circuit simulation com-
munity (see e.g., [4]), but relatively unknown to the microwave
community.
In this brief, the differences of traveling and power waves and
the respective definitions of reflection coefficients and scattering (4)
matrices are presented. It is shown how the power waves can be
derived from the principle of conjugate matching. In contrast, where, for simplicity, it has been assumed that the real part of
most of the earlier articles on power waves introduce them as is positive.
convenient mathematical constructs. Using the normalized voltage waves, the total voltage and
current can be written as follows:
Manuscript received March 8, 2007; revised June 21, 2007. This paper was
recommended by Associate Editor P. P. Sotiriadis.
The author is with Nokia Research Center, NOKIA GROUP, Helsinki, FIN-
00045, Finland (e-mail: Jussi.Rahola@nokia.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSII.2007.905420
(5)

1549-7747/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE

RAHOLA: POWER WAVES AND CONJUGATE MATCHING
Now the average normalized power carried by the wave can be
written
(6)
where the asterisk denotes complex conjugation. In the general
case when the characteristic impedance is a complex quantity
(e.g., in a lossy transmission line), the total power is not given by
the difference between the powers of the incident and scattered
waves. This is a somewhat physically dissatisfying situation.
When a transmission line is connected to a load, the total
voltage and current are related by the load impedance by
(7)
Now the standard reflection coefficient is given by
(8)
For an -port system with characteristic impedances , the
scattering matrix is defined as
(9)
where is a diagonal matrix with elements , addition, there is a reflected wave given by
is a diagonal matrix with entries and is the impedance
matrix linking currents and voltages.
The above formulas describe the reflection of power if the
characteristic impedances and are real and the transmis-
sion lines are terminated with the respective characteristic im-
pedances. Now consider the microwave circuit in Fig. 1 where a
generator with an internal impedance is connected to a load.
The reflection coefficient
(10)
describes the reflection of power only if is real. In the gen-
eral case, it is well known that maximum power transfer from
the generator to the load happens when the load is conjugate
matched to the generator. However, in this case, the above re-
flection coefficient is nonzero. Thus, the standard definition of
reflection coefficient does not in general represent the reflection
of power.
III. POWER WAVES
To remedy the problems related to traveling waves, the con-
cept of power waves has been introduced and studied, for ex-
ample, by Penfield [1], Youla [2], Kurokawa [3], and Frickey
[7]. The power waves are defined as
(11)
93
Fig. 1. Simple circuit having a generator with internal impedance Z and a
load impedance Z .
where denotes a reference impedance (assumed for sim-
plicity to have a positive real part).
The power waves were originally introduced as mathematical
concepts without giving any reasoning for the chosen formulas.
As Kurokawa [3] puts it: “the power waves are the result of just
one of an infinite number of possible linear transformations of
voltage and current.” The key idea of the current paper is to
show that the power waves can be derived from the principle of
conjugate matching.
Let us start with the analysis of the simple microwave circuit
of Fig. 1. At the reference plane denoted by the dashed line,
let us assume that there is a nonreflecting forward voltage wave
propagating to the right and associated with current . In
and . Because
the forward wave is assumed not to reflect in terms of power, it
must see an impedance , due to the principle of conjugate
matching. The reflected wave sees the impedance . Thus
(12)
The total voltage and current can be written as
(13)
and they are related by
(14)
The situation is much like in electromagnetic (EM) scattering
where an incident plane wave is traveling as if there is no scat-
terer (impedance discontinuity in the current case) present. The
scatterer gives rise to a scattered electric field and the total field
is the sum of the incident and scattered fields.
Using definitions (12) and (13), we obtain
(15)
Thus, the power waves are identical to properly normalized cur-
rent waves.
94 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 55, NO. 1, JANUARY 2008

Fig. 3. Example of a two-port system connected to a source and a load.

Fig. 2. Example of a conjugate matched network. Using the power waves, the
reflection coefficient is zero at both reference planes A and B while the reflection
coefficient of traveling waves is zero only at plane A.
Using the power waves, the total voltage and current can be
written as
line. All that matters is the impedance that is seen when looking
out from the port.
Let us collect all the voltages into a column vector , the
currents to a column vector , and the power waves into vec-
tors and . Denote by the diagonal matrix which has the
reference impedances on the diagonal. Now we can write the
definition of the power waves as

(16)
where is a diagonal matrix with entries . The
The average power delivered to the load can be written as total voltages and currents are related by the impedance matrix
: . When we plug this into the power waves and elim-
inate the current variable, we obtain

(19)

As the -matrix relates to , it is given by

(17)

which is a physically satisfying result. Thus, the power waves (20)

are clearly related to the forward and reflected power.
If we assume that the reference impedances are all identical
The reflection coefficient for power waves is given by
and real, the -matrix reduces to

(18) (21)
which is the standard expression for the -matrix in the case of
Note that the reflection coefficient of a short circuit depends on traveling waves. Overall, the power-wave theory reduces to the
the phase of . traveling waves when the reference impedances are real.
The reflection coefficient derived from the power waves is
a more natural way to analyze power in microwave circuits IV. SIMULTANEOUS MATCHING OF A TWO-PORT SYSTEM
than the traveling waves. Consider, for example, the circuit in
As an example of how the power waves can be applied, let us
Fig. 2 which is matched for maximal power transfer. At refer-
study the simultaneous conjugate matching of a two-port system
ence plane A the impedances looking to the left and right are
shown in Fig. 3. Here we want to find the impedances and
both 1 and thus both reflection coefficients and are zero.
In contrast, at reference plane B, the left and right impedances such that the system in conjugately matched. In the standard
are conjugate matched and therefore the reflection coefficient of approach (see e.g., [6], [8]) the traveling waves and the associ-
the power waves is zero while the reflection coefficient for ated reflection coefficients and scattering matrices are used. The
the traveling waves is nonzero. reflection coefficients are given by
A lossless circuit that is conjugate matched at one reference
plane is conjugate matched at all possible reference planes and
therefore the reflection coefficient will be zero everywhere.
To define the scattering matrix for power waves, it is as-
sumed that the reference impedance seen looking out of port
is and the reflected wave will see this impedance. Ac-
cording to the principle of conjugate matching, the incoming
(nonreflecting) waves have to see an impedance . Note that (22)
the term characteristic impedance is avoided here and a term
reference impedance is more appropriate. The ports can be con- where is the (real) characteristic impedance to which the
nected to a terminating load directly or through a transmission -parameters are normalized.
RAHOLA: POWER WAVES AND CONJUGATE MATCHING 95

For conjugate matching and thus maximal power transfer the
standard theory requires than the reflection coefficients will be
conjugate matched
(23)
and which were discarded as the reference
impedances would have negative real parts.)
It is also instructive to see the differences in the expressions
of the transducer power gain for the two approaches [5]. For
traveling waves, the transducer power gain is given by

The reflection coefficients and can now be solved and (28)

then the termination impedances and can be chosen. Al-
ternatively, matching circuits for arbitrary termination imped- For the power-wave approach the expression reduces to
ances can be built.
In contrast, using the power waves, the requirement for max- (29)
imal power transfer is that the reflection coefficients and
and therefore and are all zero. This is also equiv- where the termination impedances and were used as the
alent to requiring that and are both zero. The power reference impedances in the calculation of the scattering matrix.
waves thus lead to a more natural requirement for the reflec- Again, the power-wave approach gives a more natural expres-
tion coefficients than the traveling waves. Note that here we are sion, as the scattering matrix element is expected to describe
using the reflection coefficients and scattering matrices defined the propagation of power from port 1 to 2.
for power waves as given by (18) and (20), respectively, where
for the reflection coefficients we have to use the impedances that
are seen through the circuit. V. CONCLUSION
Using the power waves, we can now solve for the reference In microwave circuit theory, the concept of traveling waves
impedances that make the and zero simultaneously. based on the physical waves propagating in a transmission line
First note that the inverse of a two-by-two matrix is given by is widely used. However, the traveling waves and their reflection
coefficients do not directly describe the propagation of power
when complex characteristic impedances (e.g., in a lossy trans-
(24) mission line) are used. In contrast, power waves are mathemat-
ical constructs from the circuit world that correctly describe the
Using this, we can compute the diagonal elements and reflection of power also for environments with complex charac-
of the matrix and set them to zero teristic impedances.
The scattering matrices for traveling waves are used for rep-
resenting the properties of microwave components irrespective
of the termination impedances. In a general microwave circuit
(25)
these scattering matrices are not directly related to power and
The quantity can be solved from the first equation and can be considered as mathematical constructs to facilitate the
substituted into the second one, leading to a quadratic equation analysis of the circuit. The characteristic impedance is used as
for . A similar procedure can be followed for . After a normalization factor and the scattering matrices only describe
considerable algebraic manipulation, we obtain the propagation of power if all the transmission lines are termi-
nated with an impedance equal to the characteristic impedance.
In the case of power waves, the reference impedances for scat-
tering matrices should be chosen to be equal to the impedances
seen out of the ports of each component. In this case, the scat-
(26) tering matrix for each component describes the scattering and
absorption of power across the component.
where In this brief, it has been shown that the power waves are cur-
rent waves that can be derived from the principle of maximal
power transfer in conjugate matched conditions. Power waves
offer more natural power relations between total, incident and
(27) reflected waves than the normal traveling waves. In the deriva-
tion of the power waves, no reference to a transmission line is
Note that the correct signs in (26) have to be taken and that for used and therefore it is natural to talk about an arbitrary refer-
some impedance matrices the matrix can be a singular ence impedance instead of the characteristic impedance. The re-
matrix without an inverse. flection coefficient and scattering matrices derived from power
When the reference impedances are known, matching circuits waves are used as the basis of many circuit simulators, such as
that match the two-port to a transmission line or to a termination AWR-Aplac [4].
can be constructed. If the mutual impedances and are In the literature, there have been some opinions on the suit-
both zero, the above expressions reduce to and ability of traveling and power waves for different analyzes. For
, as is natural. (There are also the solutions example, Marks and Williams [9], [10] have criticized the power
96 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 55, NO. 1, JANUARY 2008
waves because they are not compatible with the Smith chart nor-
malized to a complex characteristic impedance. This is indeed
true, but on the other hand, the reflection coefficient given by the
Smith chart in the complex case is not related to the reflection
of power.
This brief also presents a new formula for the simultaneous
conjugate matching of a two-port system. The formula gives the
reference impedances for the ports such that the reflection co-
efficients (based on power waves) are zero on both sides and
thus all impedances are conjugate matched. In contrast, the tra-
ditional approach requires that the reflection coefficients for the
input and load are nonzero but conjugates of each other at both
sides. Thus, the power-wave approach is more natural and com-
patible with conjugate matching of the impedances. The be-
havior of the resulting matched two-port system is naturally the
same for both approaches. In principle, the power-wave analysis
of the two-port system can be enlarged to an arbitrary number
of ports, but in the general case the reference impedances have
to be solved numerically.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author would like to thank Prof. M. Valtonen, Helsinki
University of Technology, Espoo, Finland, and Mr. L. Hyvönen,
Nokia Research Center, Helsinki, Finland, for stimulating dis-
cussions on the subject of impedance matching and power
waves.
REFERENCES
[1] P. Penfield Jr., “Noise in negative resistance amplifiers,” IRE Trans.
Circuit Theory, vol. CT-7, no. 2, pp. 166–170, Jun. 1960.
[2] D. C. Youla, “On scattering matrices normalized to complex port num-
bers,” Proc. IRE, vol. 49, no. 7, pp. 1221–1221, Jul. 1961.
[3] K. Kurokawa, “Power waves and the scattering matrix,” IEEE Trans.
Microw. Theory Tech., vol. MTT-13, no. 3, pp. 194–202, Mar. 1965.
[4] M. Valtonen, P. Heikkilä, H. Jokinen, and T. Veijola, “APLAC–Ob-
ject-oriented circuit simulator and design tool,” in Low-Power HF Mi-
croelectronics–A Unified Approach, G. Machado, Ed. London, U.K.:
IEE, 1996, vol. 8.
[5] R. E. Collin, Foundations for Microwave Engineering, 2nd ed. Sin-
gapore: Wiley-Interscience, 2001.
[6] D. M. Pozar, Microwave Engineering, 3rd ed. New York: Wiley,
2005.
[7] D. A. Frickey, “Conversions between S , Z , Y , h, ABCD , and T pa-
rameters which are valid for complex source and load impedances,”
IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Techn., vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 205–211, Feb.
1994.
[8] T. T. Ha, Solid-State Microwave Amplifier Design. Malabar, FL:
Krieger, 1991.
[9] R. B. Marks and D. F. Williams, “A general waveguide circuit theory,”
J. Res. Nat. Inst. Stand. Technol., vol. 97, no. 5, pp. 533–562, Sep.-Oct.
1992.
[10] R. B. Marks and D. F. Williams, “Comments on ”conversions between
S, Z, Y, h, ABCD, and T parameters which are valid for complex
source and load impedances“,” IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Techn.,
vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 914–915, Apr. 1995.