Numerical steady state analysis of electronic circuits driven by multi-tone signals

Characteristics of analogue circuits such as intermodulation distortion and transfer characteristics can often be received from the steady state behavior. This paper presents a unified approach for the simulation of non-autonomous circuits with multi-tone excitation. The steady state is here regarded as the solution of a partial differential-algebraic equation. A suitable numerical method for its solution is a variational method with trigonometric basis functions. The Harmonic Balance technique based either on the multi- dimensional Fourier transformation or the Artificial Frequency Map technique can be interpreted as a special variant of this method.