A new time-domain simulation method for highly heterogeneous RF circuits

This paper describes a new time-domain simulation method particularly amenable for highly heterogeneous nonlinear RF circuits as modern wireless transceivers that combine analog RF and both analog and digital base-band circuitry. It uses innovative multi-rate Runge-Kutta algorithms applied to the envelope transient method over a time-domain periodic steady-state technique (shooting), to efficiently resolve strongly nonlinear circuits excited by forcing functions of very distinct time-scales and exhibiting slow (latent) and fast-varying (active) state-variables. Attributing different time-steps to these latent and active state-variables speedup gains of more than 1-to-7 in simulation time were obtained for even a circuit example of very small size.