Black-box passive macromodeling in electronics: trends and open problems

Design and verification flows in the electronics industry are relying more and more on behavioral models of components, electrical interconnects, and subsystems. Such models are often derived from tabulated frequency responses obtained via direct measurements or through electromagnetic field solvers. Model extraction from this data involves a mix of system identification and approximation in the complex frequency domain. This problem becomes difficult or badly scalable due to the presence of passivity constraints, which must be enforced during model extraction. We review recent trends to deal with this complexity, and related open issues.