An effective procedure for multi-tone steady-state analysis of mixers

The method of harmonic balance provides efficient and accurate simulation of nonlinear circuits under multi-tone excitation. Mixers are an important practical example of such circuits. Modern implementation of harmonic balance uses pre-conditioned iterative methods to solve the large linear system needed at each iteration of the nonlinear solver. This paper presents a rigorous and concise formulation of the harmonic balance equations using the language of tensor products, then develops a family of very effective pre-conditioners for multi-tone problems. Computational results on a practical mixer circuit are presented