Towards the global modeling of high frequency electronic circuits by using the lumped-element extension of FDTD method

Because of the great development of telecommunications the performance required for electronic systems are increasing in terms of operating frequency, cost, dimension and low power consumption. In particular, high operating frequencies and small dimensions cause strong electromagnetic interaction within electronic circuits: interconnection, cross-talk and package-circuit interaction are becoming common problems for the design of high frequency systems. For the accurate modeling of such structures electromagnetic propagation, electric environment and device behavior have to be accounted for at the same time. A significant effort has been recently devoted by the scientific community to developing "global" simulators. In this paper we describe the state of the development of the global simulator implemented at the University of Perugia.