Efficient Transient Analysis of Nonlinearly Loaded Low-Loss Multiconductor Interconnects

Abstract

The combined time- and frequency-domain analysis of nonlinearly loaded low-loss interconnects is addressed. We show that a variety of interconnects commonly employed in different technological applications are characterized by transfer functions, whose impulse responses have a fast initial-time structure (due to the skin effect) and a slow long-time part (due to ohmic losses). The dependence of the impulse response structure on the line parameters is discussed, along with the exact analytical solutions valid for the skin effect and ohmic losses, separately. A piecewise linear approximation of the transient functions with nonuniform sampling is proposed as an effective method to obtain high accuracy at low computational costs. Various numerical examples are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed representation, and to show that a matched characterization of the line must be adopted in order to avoid numerical artifacts.