BEST PAPER.

Three NIST researchers received the Automatic Radio Frequency Techniques Group (ARFTG) Best Paper Award at the 55th ARFTG Conference held this past June. They were given this award for their paper "Equivalent Circuit Models for Coaxial OSLT Standards," which they presented at the 54th ARFTG Conference last December. Their paper provided an analysis of the common equivalent circuit models used to describe coaxial vector network analyzer (VNA) standards. Such models are used in commercial instruments but have never been described fully or tested in the open literature. The authors developed a model based on general network analysis techniques and compared it to the calibration of a commercial instrument. Verification-device data corrected using their methods agreed well with data corrected by a commercial VNA. By uncovering the basic equations of equivalent circuit descriptions, this work revealed the limitations users face when trying to adopt the common coaxial descriptions to lossy on-wafer standards. This p aper also provided in one place all the equations necessary to perform Open-Short-Load-Thru calibrations for any standards, given either direct measurements or appropriate models for the transmission-line parameters and reflection coefficients