Macromodeling of hysteresis phenomena with SPICE

A macromodel for nonlinear devices exhibiting hysteresis is presented. Although this model is based on existing ideas of ferromagnetic hysteresis, it can be applied to all hysteresis phenomena by choosing suitable parameters. It consists only of four algebro-differential equations with ten parameters and exhibits all main features of hysteresis, such as initial curve, saturation, minor loops, coercivity, and remanence. Using standard elements of the widespread simulator SPICE, the macromodel is applicable to all commonly used circuit simulators. It is difficult to extract parameters of nonlinear differential equations from measured values. Therefore, an algorithm for parameter extraction by optimization is presented which is successfully applied to this hysteresis model.