Object-oriented design of microwave circuit simulators

Abstract : The authors introduce the motion of object-oriented design in the construction of circuit analysis software through a reflection on the basic objects and object classes of circuit analysis. Simple architectures of the three fundamental families of circuit analysis objects are given. With these fundamental families of classes, it is shown that it is as easy to build a frequency analysis of a linear circuit as to build a harmonic balance analysis of a nonlinear circuit. It is noted the object-oriented concept allows CAD (computer-aided design) tools to easily follow the state-of-the-art knowledge in circuit theory and to quickly respond to the increasing MMIC (monolithic microwave integrated circuit) design demand.