Technology CAD for Microwaves: From Devices to Circuit Performance: Technology CAD for Microwaves

Physics-based device simulators have undergone significant advancement over the last decades. In the past, technology CAD (TCAD) simulation, i.e., the numerical analysis of electron devices through device structure discretization and the numerical solution of physical equations, was generally assumed to be too demanding from a computational standpoint for the analysis of devices in the typical operating regime of microwave circuits, i.e., dynamic and nonlinear. Nowadays, leveraging advances in computation resources, and new numerical techniques based on iterative solutions of nonlinear models, all dynamic conditions can be efficiently addressed, including a large-signal (LS) periodic or quasi-periodic analysis. Typical applications include microwave circuits with multitone inputs, e.g., power amplifiers (PAs) or mixers. This article presents several demonstrations of advanced TCAD capabilities, showing how a physical simulation can seamlessly address the analysis of stand-alone devices and of entire microwave circuits, including both active devices and passive networks.