Building interchangeable black-box models of integrated circuits for EMC simulations

An interchangeable black-box model of an integrated circuit block for time-domain simulations of the direct power injection (DPI) immunity test is presented. An artificial neural network implemented as a Verilog A module is used to build a model of a bandgap reference circuit sub-block. Being a part of a larger schematic of interconnected circuit blocks, the model is able to correctly load the transistor-level block in the previous stage. The simulation time for the transient analysis is significantly improved compared to the transistor-level models, and the time-to-steady-state of the model is negligible. The accuracy of the model is comparable to the state-of-the-art black-box modelling approaches. The model is very practical for obtaining the EMC behaviour of complex integrated circuits at design-time.