Calibration of electric probes for post-processing of near-field scanning data

In order to compensate nonideal receiving characteristic of electric probes used in planar electromagnetic near-field scanning, scalar calibration and post-processing method based on deconvolution is proposed. The measurement setup and numerical procedure for discrete data processing is described in detail. The receiving characteristics of the probes are directly determined from scanning measurements and fullwave simulation of the specific calibration structure. Special attention is given to reduction of post-processing errors due to noisy input data. The compensation procedure is successfully validated with two probes and two planar test objects over two decades of frequency. The deconvolution method greatly improves spatial resolution of near-field scans and accurately determines distribution of normal electric field in true levels