EFFICIENT TRANSIENT ANALYSIS OF NONLINEARLY LOADED LOW-LOSS MULTICONDUCTOR INTERCONNECTS

The combined time- and frequency-domain analysis of nonlinearly loaded low-loss interconnects is addressed. We show that a variety of interc onnects commonly employed in different technological applications are characterized by transfer functions, whose impulse responses have a fa st initial-time structure (due to the skin effect) and a slow long-tim e part (due to ohmic losses). The dependence of the impulse response s tructure on the line parameters is discussed, along with the exact ana lytical solutions valid for the skin effect and ohmic losses, separate ly. A piecewise linear approximation of the transient functions with n onuniform sampling is proposed as an effective method to obtain high a ccuracy at low computational costs. Various numerical examples are use d to validate the effectiveness of the proposed representation, and to show that a matched characterization of the line must be adopted in o rder to avoid numerical artifacts.