The paper presents a novel, unified technique to evaluate, through physics-based modeling, the frequency conversion and noise behavior of semiconductor devices operating in large-signal periodic regime. Starting from the harmonic balance (HB) solution of the spatially discretized physics-based model under (quasi) periodic forced operation, frequency conversion at the device ports in the presence of additional input tones is simulated by application of the small-signal large-signal network approach to the model. Noise analysis under large-signal operation readily follows as a direct extension of classical approaches by application of the frequency conversion principle to the modulated microscopic noise sources and to the propagation of these to the external device terminals through a Green's function technique. An efficient numerical implementation is discussed within the framework of a drift-diffusion model and some examples are finally provided on the conversion and noise behavior of rf Si diodes.
SUMMARYA general numerical technique is proposed for the assessment of the stability of periodic solutions and the determination of bifurcations for limit cycles in autonomous nonlinear systems represented by ordinary differential equations in the differential-algebraic form. The method is based on the harmonic balance (HB) technique, and exploits the same Jacobian matrix of the nonlinear system used in the Newton iterative numerical solution of the HB equations for the determination of the periodic steady state. To demonstrate the approach, it is applied to the determination of the bifurcation curves in the parameters' space of Chua's circuit with cubic nonlinearity, and to the study of the dynamics of the limit cycle of a Colpitts oscillator.
This paper presents a spectral approach, based on the harmonic-balance technique, for detecting limit-cycle bifurcations in complex nonlinear circuits. The key step of the proposed approach is a method for a simple and effective computation of the Floquet multipliers (FM's) that yield stability and bifurcation conditions. As a case-study, a quite complex system, Chua's circuit, is considered. It is shown that the spectral approach is able to accurately evaluate the most significant bifurcation curves.
The paper presents a general approach to numerically simulate the noise behavior of bipolar solid-state electron devices through a physics-based multidimensional device model. The proposed technique accounts for noise sources due to carrier velocity and population fluctuations. The power and correlation spectra of the external current or voltage fluctuations are evaluated through a Green's function, linear perturbation theory equivalent to the classical Impedance Field Method for noise analysis and its generalizations. The numerical implementation of the method is performed through an efficient technique, which allows noise analysis to be carried out with negligible overhead with respect to the small-signal simulation. Some case studies are analyzed in order to compare the present approach with theoretical results from the classical noise theory of pn junctions and bipolar transistors.
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