A fully automatic domain partitioning technique for the efficient circuit-level simulation of large nonlinear microwave subsystems

The domain partitioning concept is applied to the circuit-level simulation of complex nonlinear microwave subsystems of arbitrary topology, such as entire front-ends. The subsystem is described as a whole at the data entry level, but is automatically split into the interconnection of a near-optimal number of nonlinear blocks at run time. Nonlinear analysis is based on a scattering-matrix version of Krylov-subspace harmonic balance (HB) in order to avoid Y-matrix singularities in the decomposition process. This leads to high numerical efficiency and allows an excellent tradeoff between the piecewise and nodal HB approaches to be established.