State of the art and present trends in nonlinear microwave CAD techniques

The authors present a survey of modern nonlinear CAD (computer-aided design) techniques as applied to the specific field of microwave circuits. A number of fundamental aspects of the nonlinear CAD problem, including simulation, optimization, intermodulation, frequency conversion, stability, and noise, are addressed and developed. For each one it is shown that either well-established CAD solutions are available, or at least a solution approach suitable for implementation in a general-purpose CAD environment can be outlined. Also, the discussion shows that the various subjects are not just separate items, but rather can be chained in a strictly logical sequence. Finally, an elementary treatment of vector processing is given, to show that supercomputers can handle the involved large-size numerical problems efficiently