C ircu it Intu itions

Ali Sheikholeslami

Why Sinusoids?

W
Welcome to the 13th article in the ant (LTI) components such as lin- we can approximate f ^o i h by the first
“Circuit Intuitions” column series. ear resistors and linear capacitors two terms in its Taylor expansion. In
As the title suggests, each article to model circuit behavior. A linear other words, we can write
provides insights and intuitions into resistor is simply characterized by
circuit design and analysis. These o ^ t h = Ri ^ t h where the voltage o ^ t h i o = f ^V0h + f l^V0h do i , (2)
articles are aimed at undergraduate across the resistor is proportional
students but may serve the interests of to the current i ^ t h through the resis- where do i represents an increment
other readers as well. I would appre- tor. If R is constant, i.e., it does not in the input voltage around Vo . If
ciate your comments and feedback change over time, then the resistor is we similarly denote by di o the cor-
as well as requests and suggestions said to be time invariant. Similarly, responding increment around I 0, we
for future articles in this series. Please an LTI capacitor is characterized by can write
e-mail your comments to me at ali@ i ^ t h = C do ^ t h /dt, where C is a con-
ece.utoronto.ca. stant. The capacitor is considered di o = g m do i , (3)
Sinusoids are basic necessities for linear because if we scale o ^ t h by a
circuit designers. We learn about si­ constant factor, i ^ t h will also scale where g m = f l^V0h is called the small-
nu­soids, e.g., cos ^ ~t h, by the same factor. signal short circuit transconductance
and complex sinu- And if C does not of the transistor. Equation (3) simply
soids, e.g., e j~t , in We learn about c h a nge w it h t i m e
the first year of our sinusoids (i.e., C is constant),
undergraduate pro- and complex the capacitor is con-
gram, and we con- sinusoids in the sidered LTI. i0 i0
tinue to work with first year of our When a compo- vi f (vi )
them through our undergraduate nent is nonlinear by
δi0
graduate studies and program, and nature, the input–
in the careers that fol- we continue to output relationship
low. The word “fre- work with them i s gove r n e d b y a I0
quency” is probably through our nonlinear function. In
the word you hear graduate studies these cases, we try δvi
frequently in the context and in the careers to limit our input and
of circuit design. But output variables to VTn V0 vi
that follow.
why? Why are sinu- such a small range
soids so important t h at a l l o w s u s t o Figure 1: A nonlinear function is
to electrical engineering in general approximate the nonlinear relation- ­approximated by a linear function in a
small region around the bias point.
and to circuit designers in particu- ship with a linear one. For example,
lar? Why don’t we use rectangular as shown in Figure 1, an NMOS tran-
or triangular waveforms to the same sistor whose output current ^i o h is a
extent? This article attempts to an- nonlinear function of its input volt-
x (t ) LTI y (t )
swer these questions. age ^o i h can be characterized by
In circuit design and analysis, we Circuit/System
often resort to linear time-invari- i o = f ^o i h .(1)
Figure 2: An LTI circuit is fully character-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2017.2701718 If we limit the input voltage to a ized when we can identify the output for
Date of publication: 21 June 2017 small signal around a dc voltage Vo, any arbitrary input waveform.

10 s p r i n g 2 0 17 IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

models the transistor as an LTI cir-
cuit for small signals.
Now let us consider a general LTI
circuit as shown in Figure 2, where
the input and output variables could
be either voltage or current wave-
forms. A very important property of
LTI circuits is that a sinusoid input
results in a sinusoid output. In other
words, if we assume the input vari-
able is of the form x ^ t h = cos ^~t h,
then the output variable is of the
form y ^ t h = A cos ^~t + {h, where A
and { are constants (i.e., not func-
tions of time) and the output fre-
quency is the same as the input
frequency. In other words, the LTI sys-
tem maintains the general shape of
a sinusoid except for a scaling in
amplitude and a shift in phase (con-
stant delay in time) where both param-
eters are only functions of ~.
More interestingly, if we consider
the input to be a complex sinusoid
x ^ t h = e j~t , the output will be the
same as the input except for a scal-
ing factor. The scaling factor is con-
stant, i.e., it is not a function of time,
but it is a function of ~. If we rep-
resent this scaling factor as H ^ j~h,
implying its dependence on ~, we
can write the following expression
for the output: y ^ t h = H ^ j~h e j~t. This
equation states that the complex
exponentials simply go through an
LTI system unchanged except for a
constant multiplication factor.
Do you know any other function
that maintains its shape as it goes
through any LTI system? Certainly
none of the rectangular or triangular
functions possesses this property.
Consider, for example, a rectangular
voltage waveform applied to a series
RC circuit and observe the voltage
across the capacitor as the output of
this circuit. In this case, the output
has little resemblance to the input,
especially when the RC time constant
of the circuit is much larger than the
period of the input waveform.
A function that goes through an
LTI system without change in shape
(except for a scaling factor) is called
an eigenfunction of the LTI system.
This is quite similar to the concept
of eigenvectors in linear algebra [1],
IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE s p r i n g 2 0 17 11
Y = AV = λV
x1 a b c y1
Y = AX
X= x2 A= d e f Y = AX = y2 X
V
x3 g h i y3
(a) (b) (c)
Figure 3: (a) In linear algebra, a system may be characterized by a matrix A (3×3 in this
example) where the input vector X is multiplied by A to produce the output vector Y. (b) An
input vector A is both scaled and rotated by the system. (c) An input ­eigenvector V results in
an output vector that is aligned with the input vector.
where a linear system receives, for sinusoids knowing that each com-
example, a three-dimensional vector plex sinusoid is simply multiplied
X as its input and multi- by a constant H ^ j~h
plies it by a fixed 3 × 3 to produce the corres­
matrix A to produce a ponding output sinu-
three-dimensional vec-
Do you know any soid (see Figure 4). The
tor Y at the output [see
other function process of represent-
F i­­­­g ure 3(a)]. That is,
that maintains its ing a signal as a lin-
Y3 # 1 = A 3 # 3 X 3 # 1. M o s t
shape as it goes ear combination of
input vectors will scale
through any LTI complex sinusoids is
and rotate as they go
system? done through a Fou-
through this syst e m rier transform of the
[see Figure 3(b)], except input signal. The Fou-
for three sets of input vectors that rier transform simply takes the input
are called eigenvectors. The eigen- x ^ t h and represents it as a linear
vectors are defined as input vectors continuous sum (integral) of com-
that are scaled as they go through the plex sinusoids:
system but maintain their direc-
x^ t h = 1 #
+3
tion [see Figure 3(c)]. For an eigen- X ^ j~h e j~t d~ (4)
2r - 3
vector, the matrix multiplication
reduces to a simple scalar multipli- where X ^ j~h is found by correlat-
cation because the input and output ing the input signal with each of the
vectors are aligned. In other words, eigenfunctions:
we can write: AV = mV, where V is
X ^ j~ h = #
+3
an eigenvector and m is its corre- x ^ t h e -j~t dt. (5)
-3
sponding eigenvalue.
Once we find three independent The process of finding the out-
normalized eigenvectors and their put waveform for an arbitrary input
corresponding eigenvalues, we can is now simple. The output is the
represent any input vector as a linear continuous sum (integral) of all the
combination of these eigenvectors. input sinusoids multiplied by their
In doing so, we can replace lengthy corresponding eigenvalues H ^ j~h. In
matrix multiplications by three sca- other words,
lar multiplications, one correspond-
ing to each of the eigenvectors in the
linear representation.
We now return to the fact that
e jωt H ( jω)e jωt
complex sinusoids are the eigenfunc- H ( jω)
tions of the LTI systems. We note that,
in this case, we have infinitely many
eigenfunctions corresponding to all
Figure 4: Complex sinusoids (e j~t ) are
values of ~ (from zero to 3). We can the eigenfunctions of any LTI system as
represent any arbitrary input signal they preserve their shapes when they pass
as a linear combination of complex through the system, only scaled by H ( j~) .

y^ t h = 1 #- +33 H^ j~hX^ j~he j~t d~. (6)
2r
The reader can verify that H ^ j~h is also
the Fourier transform of the impulse
response of the system [2].
Finally, although we try our best
to operate our circuits in so-called
linear regions, there is always some
level of nonlinearity present. Interest-
ingly enough, to characterize the non-
linearity of a circuit, we often apply
a sinusoid with a single frequency
(known as a single tone) and observe
the output. If the system is completely
linear, we would expect a sinusoid of
the same frequency at the output. Any
nonlinearity, i.e., any deviation from
a linear relationship, results in addi-
tional sinusoids at the output whose
frequencies are multiples of the input
frequency. These additional sinusoids
are known as harmonics. By measur-
ing the power of the harmonics rela-
tive to the power of the main tone, we
quantify the amount of nonlinearity in
our circuit.
In summary, complex sinusoids
are simply multiplied by a complex
number when they go through an LTI
system, and because they span the
signal space, they can combine lin-
early to form any signal of interest. An
arbitrary input signal can be written
as a linear combination of complex
sinusoids as shown in (4), which, when
fed to an LTI system, maintains the
shapes of its sinusoids and only mul-
tiplies them by H ^ j~h, whose value is
only a f­unction of ~. For this reason,
an LTI circuit is fully characterized by
H ^ j~h, which is also the F
­ ourier trans-
form of the LTI system response to
an impulse.
References
[1] D. Norman and D. Wolczuk, Introduction
to Linear Algebra for Science and Engi-
neering, 2nd ed. Canada: Pearson, 2011.
[2] A. V. Oppenheim, A. S. Willsky, and S.
H. Nawab, Signals and Systems, 2nd ed.
­Canada: Pearson, 1997.


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12 s p r i n g 2 0 17 IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE