Characterization of Intermodulation and Memory Effects Using Offset Multisine Excitation

This paper proposes a new class of multisine excitations that allows efficient characterization of nonlinear circuits. By offsetting the frequency of tones, one can distinguish between different intermodulation products in a multisine response. This property leads to many applications for nonlinear circuit characterization, such as in-band distortion measurements, memory effects characterization, and model performance assessment. Some applications are highlighted in this paper, focusing especially on the characterization of memory effects. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated with a series of measurement results.