Reconfigurable Over-the-Air Chamber for Mobile Device Testing: Analysis and Design

The reconfigurable over-the-air (OTA) chamber (ROTAC) is a reverberation chamber (RC) that, when used for OTA testing of mobile devices, offers enhanced control of the field incident on a device under test (DUT). This article presents a model based on the method of moments (MoM) electromagnetic analysis and network theory that offers an efficient characterization of the ROTAC, making it useful for ROTAC design and optimization. The development includes the application of the Ewald transformation to accelerate the computation of the slowly convergent cavity Green’s function. Comparisons with measured data from a prototype ROTAC demonstrate the model’s accuracy. The article concludes by using the tools to optimize the ROTAC physical probe arrangement and explore its ability to synthesize specified fields as well as its sensitivity to excitation errors as a function of the probe arrangement.