Transient voltage suppression (TVS) diodes help protect electronic circuits from surge voltages associated with an electrostatic discharge (ESD) event and are commonly placed alongside I/O lines, audio hardware, human interface devices, power supplies, and an antenna’s RF front end (RFFE).
TVS diode simulation presents certain challenges. Full-wave time-domain electromagnetic (EM) solvers can analyze a device’s 3-D CAD geometry, but the circuit component models are limited. Alternatively, circuit solvers can simulate complex nonlinear elements, but 3-D EM effects and signal delay are approximated as inductors, capacitors, or distributed elements, such as a transmission line.
This paper introduces XFdtd’s transient EM/circuit co-simulation capability, which combines the strength of 3-D full-wave electromagnetic simulation with the flexibility of circuit solvers. This approach embeds a transient nonlinear circuit solver in the full-wave simulation so that all electromagnetic phenomena are accounted for in a single time-domain simulation.
