Simulations of Pulse Signals with X-Parameters

Nonlinearity is becoming increasingly important to IC technologies. From the PHD formalism, X-parameter models provide an accurate frequency-domain method under large-signal operating points to characterize their nonlinear behaviors. In this work, X-parameter models are investigated to handle time-domain pulse signals which is critical to IC signal integrity but was not studied before. Two representative circuits, an analog LNA and a digital CMOS buffer, were employed to characterize the X-parameter performance. The results obtained in this paper provide the first hand data for pulse signal responses of X-parameters in signal integrity modelings.