Polyharmonic distortion modeling

For more than a quarter of a century, microwave engineers have had the benefit of a foundation of mutually interacting components of measurement, modeling, and simulation to design and test linear components and systems. S-parameters are perhaps the most successful behavioral models ever. They have the powerful property that the S-parameters of individual components are sufficient to determine the S-parameters of any combination of those components. S-parameters of a component are sufficient to predict its response to any signal, provided only that the signal is of sufficiently small amplitude. We have presented the PHD modeling approach. It is a black-box frequency-domain model that provides a foundation for measurement, modeling, and simulation of driven nonlinear systems. The PHD model is very accurate for a wide variety of nonlinear characteristics, including compression, AM-PM, harmonics, load-pull, and time-domain waveforms. The PHD model faithfully represents driven nonlinear systems with mismatches at both the fundamental and harmonics. This enables the accurate simulation of distortion through cascaded chains of nonlinear components, thus providing key new design verification capabilities for RF and microwave modules and subsystems