Characterization of Electromagnetic Device by Means of Spice Models

— In this paper, the lumped parameter circuital approach devoted to the simulation of massive, conductive, and ferromagnetic cores including eddy currents and nonlinearity is presented. In the first part of the paper, the circuit analogies devoted to the simulation of magnetic structure coupled with external electrical and eventually mechanical equations are summarised. The two techniques are known in the literature as reluctance-resistance and permeancecapacitance analogies. In particular, it is put in evidence the exploitation of the gyrator component in the modelling of the coupling among magnetic and electrical quantities. The originality of this paper consists in demonstrating for the first time that the rotator-capacitor approach is very suitable for simulations in spice environment and the solution is validated on real applications. Following the circuital approach, the effect of the conductivity and nonlinear magnetic behaviour of the magnetic branches is formalized and introduced in the model. The simulation of the conductivity behaviour, which introduces in massive cores significant eddy current effects, is modelled according to the two possible analogies: the reluctance and the permeance-capacitor model. Under sinusoidal steady-state behaviour, energy aspects related to the two models are then presented and discussed. The nonlinearity is taken into account through the fixed-point technique which is suitable for a lumped circuit representation. The full circuital approach is then adopted for the simulation of the real electromechanical actuator under transient and sinusoidal steady-state behaviour conditions. The simulated result is then compared with numerical finite element and experimental result

The Multiplicative Base Solution to the Differential Equations in Analog Circuits

This work focuses to solve any order of scalar differential equation involved in analog circuit representation. These types of mathematical representations have many applications in analysis and processing such as noise, filter, audio, RLC distributed interconnection (nodes) and transmission lines. Such systems are represented with scalar type differential equations and use numerical method to find a solution. One of the most successful methods is the fourth-order Runge–Kutta. This study introduced a multiplicative version of Runge–Kutta (MRK4) method. The performance analysis of the MRK4 is examined based on the error analysis method. The MRK4 method is applied to solve equations representing the linear and the nonlinear type systems. Results indicate the MRK4 to be superior with respect to the RK4 method.

Analysis of Electrothermal Effects in Devices and Arrays in InGaP/GaAs HBT Technology

In this paper, the dc electrothermal behavior of InGaP/GaAs HBT test devices and arrays for power amplifier output stages is extensively analyzed through an efficient simulation approach. The approach relies on a full circuit representation of the domains, which accounts for electrothermal effects through the thermal equivalent of the Ohm’s law and can be solved in any commercial circuit simulator. In particular, the power-temperature feedback is described through an equivalent thermal network automatically obtained by (i) generating a realistic 3-D geometry/mesh of the domain in the environment of a numerical tool with the aid of an in-house routine; (ii) feeding the geometry/mesh to FANTASTIC, which extracts the network without performing simulations. Nonlinear thermal effects adversely affecting the behavior of devices/arrays at high temperatures are included through a calibrated Kirchhoff’s transformation. For the test devices, the thermally-induced distortion in I–V curves is explained, and the limits of the safe operating regions are identified for a wide range of bias conditions. A deep insight into the electrothermal behavior of the arrays is then provided, with particular emphasis on the detrimental nonuniform operation. Useful guidelines are offered to designers in terms of layout and choice of the ballasting strategy.

Energy-Efficient Multiferroic Spin-Devices and Spin-Circuits

Spin-devices are switched by flipping spins without moving charge in space and this can lead to ultra-low-energy switching replacing traditional transistors in beyond Moore’s law era. In particular, the electric field-induced magnetization switching has emerged to be an energy-efficient paradigm. Here, we review the recent developments on ultra-low-energy, area-efficient, and fast spin-devices using multiferroic magnetoelectric composites. It is shown that both digital logic gates and analog computing with transistor-like high-gain region in the input-output characteristics of multiferroic composites are feasible. We also review the equivalent spin-circuit representation of spin-devices by considering spin potential and spin current similar to the charge-based counterparts using Kirchhoff’s voltage/current laws, which is necessary for the development of large-scale circuits. We review the spin-circuit representation of spin pumping, which happens anyway when there is a material adjacent to a rotating magnetization and therefore it is particularly necessary to be incorporated in device modeling. Such representation is also useful for understanding and proposing experiments. In spin-circuit representation, spin diffusion length is an important parameter and it is shown that a thickness-dependent spin diffusion length reflecting Elliott–Yafet spin relaxation mechanism in platinum is necessary to match the experimental results.