Applications of the Multi-Interval Chebyshev Collocation Method in RF Circuit Simulation

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the multi-interval Chebyshev (MIC) method for analog and radio-frequency (RF) circuit simulations. The method has been applied in a wide variety of circuit analyses including periodic steady-state, time-varying small signal, and cyclostationary noise analyses for both driven and autonomous circuits. In contrast to traditional analog/RF circuit simulations using either low-order time-domain integration methods or harmonic balance methods, we show that the MIC method can efficiently achieve high accuracy on strongly nonlinear circuits possessing waveforms with rapid transitions. In addition, it has the same flexibility in simulating frequency-dependent components as the harmonic balance methods but can use similar preconditioning strategies and matrix-implicit Krylov-subspace solvers as time-domain techniques, leading to good convergence on nonlinear problems.