Transient analysis of microwave Gunn oscillator using extended spectral element time domain method

Abstract

In this study, the microwave Gunn oscillator is analyzed by a hybrid electromagnetic circuit simulator, which is based on the spectral element time domain (SETD) method. The Gunn diode within the oscillator is treated as a lumped element, while the passive distributed part of the oscillator is modeled using the SETD method. In order to incorporate the contribution of the Gunn diode into the SETD context, the SETD method is extended by introducing a lumped current term into the second‐order vector wave equation. When Galerkin's method is used for the space discretization and the central difference scheme is used for time stepping, a global SETD system involving the Gunn diode is assembled. Furthermore, the global system matrix is block‐diagonal and the inversion of this matrix can be easily implemented, and thus the extended SETD method is a fully explicit solver and CPU time can be significantly reduced. By virtue of this method, the strong nonlinear feature of the Gunn oscillator is well characterized in the time domain, such as the phenomenon of injection locking. Numerical results demonstrate the ability and effectiveness of the extended SETD method for the fast analysis of microwave Gunn oscillator.