A procedure for the piecewise-linear approximation of the resistive part of a cellular nonlinear network

This paper deals with the approximate synthesis of multiterminal (or multi-port) nonlinear resistors. In particular, the multi-terminal resistors that make up the resistive part of a recently defined class of cellular nonlinear networks (CNNs), devoted to the minimization of continuous functionals, are considered. The proposed approximation method is based on the piecewise-linear (PWL) approach developed by Julian et al. in the last few years, but it resorts to a different definition of the inner product - hence to other PWL basis functions - and to a new model-reduction strategy. The whole procedure is applied to an application example.