Efficient nonlinear distortion analysis of RF circuits

The third order intercept point (IP3) is an important figure of merit which gives a measure of the linearity of communication circuits. There are two classes of methods for calculating the IP3 of a circuit. The first is analytical and is usually based on Volterra series. This approach is cumbersome and is difficult to apply to arbitrary circuits with arbitrary non-linearities. The second class of methods is based on multi-tone simulations and is general and flexible but requires significant CPU cost. In this thesis a new method based on the computation of the circuit moments is proposed. The new approach uses the circuit moments in order to numerically compute the Volterra kernels. This automates the process of numerically obtaining such kernels for any circuit and results in an efficient approach for the computation of IP3 for arbitrary circuits. The proposed approach is simple to apply and presents a significant improvement in CPU cost over existing methods.