On the effective dominant pole of the distributed RC networks

Abstract

A technique is developed to determine the effective dominant pole of the distributed circuits. The concept of the effective dominant pole facilitates enormously the time and frequency domain calculations. Key features of the steady-state and transient response such as bandwidth, rise time and time delay, etc., of the network functions can be easily and accurately determined without much effort. Although transfer functions of the exponentially tapered distributed RC network are considered in this paper, the method has a much broader application for all types of distributed RC circuits with arbitrary taper and diffused base transistors. The method of approximation which makes use of the product expansion of transcendental functions permits the location of the effective dominant pole by means of a simple algebraic formula and to a degree of accuracy acceptable for most engineering purposes.