| With the rapidly increasing interest in applications such as radio frequency wireless communication and high-speed data processing, electronic systems are required to work at progressively higher frequencies. As the operating frequencies enter the GHz range, phenomena such as cross talk, power-ground-plane voltage bounce, and substrate losses can no longer be neglected. In order to design high-performance systems with fast times-to-market, it is essential to be able to analyze whole or part of the system at one fundamentally deeper level of physics: distributed electromagnetic (EM) field analysis needs to be rigorously and seamlessly included as an addition to traditional circuit simulation.; This dissertation proposed several techniques that can be used to address the above problem. First, a surface only Partial Element Equivalent Circuit method was presented, using this method, EM structures are modeled by distributed inductors, capacitors, resistors and controlled sources, and the whole system will then be solved by a circuit solver. Then, a fully coupled circuit/electromagnetic solving scheme that uses surface integral equation to model the conductors while using traditional KCL and KVL for circuit formulation was introduced, the coupling scheme employed in this formulation guarantees a seamless transition between EM domain and circuit domain. Based on the fully coupled circuit/electromagnetic formulation, a novel sensitivity analysis method was also developed, in this method, the system only needs to be solved only once, sensitivity of system performances versus geometry changes can be derived with a little extra setup computational overhead.; The coupled solver provides not only the traditional voltage and current, but also the distributed field information that will be very helpful for design improvement. Derivative information provided by the efficient sensitivity analysis can also be used for direction search based layout optimization. With these techniques, layout aware high frequency circuit design method can be achieved. |
