8. Conclusions

Combining the BLA with a noise analysis creates a DCA that pin-points the sources of non-linear distortion in a circuit under excitation of complex, modulated signals. The method doesn’t require special models and can be implemented easily with the help of a few post-processing steps on top of a commercial simulator.

The BLA-based DCA works for both weakly and strongly non-linear circuits, returns a single distortion contribution for each sub-circuit, and takes the correlation between the distortion introduced by the sub-circuits into account. The method can be applied hierarchically and is therefore suitable to be applied to large circuits without introducing hundreds of contributions.

The method has been demonstrated on several examples and is shown to be able to provide information about the source of non-linear distortion in a two-stage op-amp, a Doherty power amplifier and a fully differential Gm-C filter.