Analysis of pulse propagation on high-speed VLSI chips

A method is presented for the analysis of lossy interconnections terminated with nonlinear loads. The crux of the method is a piecewise decomposition technique that decomposes the nonlinear network into linear and nonlinear subnetworks. The linear subnetworks contain the distributed models for the interconnections. The terminals of the subnetworks are excited by piecewise linear sources. The linear subnetworks are solved in the frequency domain and the nonlinear subnetworks are solved in the time domain. Newton's iterations are used to adjust the parameters of the piecewise linear sources so that the topological and constitutive relations of each subnetwork, as well as the topological equations resulting from the interconnection of the subnetworks, are satisfied