Reverse Engineering Through Electromagnetic and Harmonic Balance Simulations

In this communication, we address the Computer Aided Design issue by means of Harmonic Balance (HB) and Electromagnetic (EM) simulations with application to the design of a tripler with an output frequency @ 250 GHz. For this purpose, Heterostructure Barrier Varactors (HBV´s) with state-of-the art performances in terms of voltage handling (10 V) and capacitance ratio (> 5:1) were fabricated starting from InP-based growth epilayers. The devices are fully dc and rf characterized up to 110 GHz by means of three kinds of test samples. On this basis, de-embedding techniques combining measurements at the intrinsic level and characterization of the diode electromagnetic environment are described in details having in mind a top-down approach.