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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSII: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 55, NO. 1, JANUARY 2008

Power Waves and Conjugate Matching

Jussi Rahola, Senior Member, IEEE

AbstractThe concept of power waves gives more natural relations between incident and reflected power in a microwave network than the typically used traveling waves. The reflection coefficient 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 reasoning of power waves is given starting from the principle of conjugate matching. In addition, a new formula for the reference impedances for a two-port system is given such that the system is
simultaneously conjugate matched for both ports.

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 reflection coefficients on both sides of a two-port system are nonzero,
but conjugate matched to the load and source reflection coefficients. In the power-wave approach, the reflection coefficients
will be zero simultaneously and the impedances will be conjugate matched, corresponding to the principle of maximal power
transfer.

Index TermsCircuit analysis, impedance matching, scattering

parameters, two-port circuits.

I. INTRODUCTION

HE use of the reflection coefficient and the scattering matrix is at the heart of microwave circuit theory. In most textbooks, the reflection coefficient is defined using the so-called
traveling waves that are the forward and backward traveling
voltage and current waves in a transmission line. This definition
has the fundamental problem that a zero-reflection coefficient
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
is generally different from zero reflection. One can therefore say
that the standard definition of the reflection coefficient does not
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
characteristic impedance.
To remedy the above situation, the concept of so-called power
waves has been introduced and studied, for example, by Penfield
[1], Youla [2] and Kurokawa [3]. The power waves are mathematical constructs which are compatible with the condition
of conjugate matching and give physically satisfying expressions for the total power as a difference of forward and backward powers also for complex characteristic impedances. The
concept of power waves is used by the circuit simulation community (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
matrices are presented. It is shown how the power waves can be
derived from the principle of conjugate matching. In contrast,
most of the earlier articles on power waves introduce them as
convenient mathematical constructs.

II. TRAVELING WAVES

In microwave circuit theory, the standard approach is to use
the so-called traveling waves that are based on the idea of forward and backward traveling voltage and current waves both
having impedances equal to the characteristic impedance of the
transmission line [5], [6].
and
In a transmission line with characteristic impedance
propagation constant , the total voltage and current are written
as a sum of forward and reflected traveling waves

(1)
The total voltage and current are written as

(2)
where the voltage and current amplitudes are related by

(3)
With these definitions, the normalized voltage wave amplitudes
can be written as

(4)
where, for simplicity, it has been assumed that the real part of
is positive.
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, FIN00045, Finland (e-mail: Jussi.Rahola@nokia.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSII.2007.905420
1549-7747/$25.00 2007 IEEE

(5)

RAHOLA: POWER WAVES AND CONJUGATE MATCHING

93

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
by
voltage and current are related by the load impedance
(7)
Now the standard reflection coefficient is given by

(8)
For an -port system with characteristic impedances
scattering matrix is defined as

, the

(9)
where is a diagonal matrix with elements
,
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
and
are real and the transmischaracteristic impedances
sion lines are terminated with the respective characteristic impedances. Now consider the microwave circuit in Fig. 1 where a
is connected to a load.
generator with an internal impedance
The reflection coefficient

Fig. 1. Simple circuit having a generator with internal impedance

load impedance Z .

and a

where
denotes a reference impedance (assumed for simplicity 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
addition, there is a reflected wave given by
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)

(10)
is real. In the gendescribes the reflection of power only if
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 reflection coefficient is nonzero. Thus, the standard definition of
reflection coefficient does not in general represent the reflection
of power.

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 scatterer (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

III. POWER WAVES

To remedy the problems related to traveling waves, the concept of power waves has been introduced and studied, for example, by Penfield [1], Youla [2], Kurokawa [3], and Frickey
[7]. The power waves are defined as
(15)
(11)

Thus, the power waves are identical to properly normalized current waves.

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSII: 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 vecthe diagonal matrix which has the
tors and . Denote by
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
total voltages and currents are related by the impedance matrix
:
. When we plug this into the power waves and eliminate the current variable, we obtain

The average power delivered to the load can be written as

(19)
(17)
which is a physically satisfying result. Thus, the power waves
are clearly related to the forward and reflected power.
The reflection coefficient for power waves is given by
(18)
Note that the reflection coefficient of a short circuit depends on
the phase of
.
The reflection coefficient derived from the power waves is
a more natural way to analyze power in microwave circuits
than the traveling waves. Consider, for example, the circuit in
Fig. 2 which is matched for maximal power transfer. At reference plane A the impedances looking to the left and right are
both 1 and thus both reflection coefficients and
are zero.
In contrast, at reference plane B, the left and right impedances
are conjugate matched and therefore the reflection coefficient of
the power waves
is zero while the reflection coefficient for
the traveling waves is nonzero.
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 assumed that the reference impedance seen looking out of port
is
and the reflected wave will see this impedance. According to the principle of conjugate matching, the incoming
(nonreflecting) waves have to see an impedance
. Note that
the term characteristic impedance is avoided here and a term
reference impedance is more appropriate. The ports can be connected to a terminating load directly or through a transmission

As the -matrix relates

to , it is given by
(20)

If we assume that the reference impedances are all identical

and real, the -matrix reduces to
(21)
which is the standard expression for the -matrix in the case of
traveling waves. Overall, the power-wave theory reduces to the
traveling waves when the reference impedances are real.
IV. SIMULTANEOUS MATCHING OF A TWO-PORT SYSTEM
As an example of how the power waves can be applied, let us
study the simultaneous conjugate matching of a two-port system
and
shown in Fig. 3. Here we want to find the impedances
such that the system in conjugately matched. In the standard
approach (see e.g., [6], [8]) the traveling waves and the associated reflection coefficients and scattering matrices are used. The
reflection coefficients are given by

(22)
where
is the (real) characteristic impedance to which the
-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

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

(23)
and
can now be solved and
The reflection coefficients
and
can be chosen. Althen the termination impedances
ternatively, matching circuits for arbitrary termination impedances can be built.
In contrast, using the power waves, the requirement for maxand
imal power transfer is that the reflection coefficients
and therefore
and
are all zero. This is also equivalent to requiring that
and
are both zero. The power
waves thus lead to a more natural requirement for the reflection coefficients than the traveling waves. Note that here we are
using the reflection coefficients and scattering matrices defined
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.
Using the power waves, we can now solve for the reference
and
zero simultaneously.
impedances that make the
First note that the inverse of a two-by-two matrix is given by

(24)
Using this, we can compute the diagonal elements
and
of the matrix
and set them to zero

(25)
can be solved from the first equation and
The quantity
substituted into the second one, leading to a quadratic equation
. A similar procedure can be followed for
. After
for
considerable algebraic manipulation, we obtain

(26)
where

(27)
Note that the correct signs in (26) have to be taken and that for
can be a singular
some impedance matrices the matrix
matrix without an inverse.
When the reference impedances are known, matching circuits
that match the two-port to a transmission line or to a termination
and
are
can be constructed. If the mutual impedances
and
both zero, the above expressions reduce to
, as is natural. (There are also the solutions

(28)
For the power-wave approach the expression reduces to
(29)
and
were used as the
where the termination impedances
reference impedances in the calculation of the scattering matrix.
Again, the power-wave approach gives a more natural expresis expected to describe
sion, as the scattering matrix element
the propagation of power from port 1 to 2.
V. CONCLUSION
In microwave circuit theory, the concept of traveling waves
based on the physical waves propagating in a transmission line
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 transmission line) are used. In contrast, power waves are mathematical constructs from the circuit world that correctly describe the
reflection of power also for environments with complex characteristic impedances.
The scattering matrices for traveling waves are used for representing the properties of microwave components irrespective
of the termination impedances. In a general microwave circuit
these scattering matrices are not directly related to power and
can be considered as mathematical constructs to facilitate the
analysis of the circuit. The characteristic impedance is used as
a normalization factor and the scattering matrices only describe
the propagation of power if all the transmission lines are terminated with an impedance equal to the characteristic impedance.
In the case of power waves, the reference impedances for scattering matrices should be chosen to be equal to the impedances
seen out of the ports of each component. In this case, the scattering matrix for each component describes the scattering and
absorption of power across the component.
In this brief, it has been shown that the power waves are current 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
reflected waves than the normal traveling waves. In the derivation of the power waves, no reference to a transmission line is
used and therefore it is natural to talk about an arbitrary reference impedance instead of the characteristic impedance. The reflection coefficient and scattering matrices derived from power
waves are used as the basis of many circuit simulators, such as
AWR-Aplac [4].
In the literature, there have been some opinions on the suitability of traveling and power waves for different analyzes. For
example, Marks and Williams [9], [10] have criticized the power

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waves because they are not compatible with the Smith chart normalized 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 coefficients (based on power waves) are zero on both sides and
thus all impedances are conjugate matched. In contrast, the traditional 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 compatible with conjugate matching of the impedances. The behavior 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. Hyvnen,

Nokia Research Center, Helsinki, Finland, for stimulating discussions on the subject of impedance matching and power
waves.
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[3] K. Kurokawa, Power waves and the scattering matrix, IEEE Trans.
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