Evaluating MOSFET harmonic distortion by successive integration of the I–V characteristics

A new method, which we have named “Full Successive Integrals Method” (FSIM), is presented for evaluating harmonic distortion of semiconductor devices from their static I–V characteristics. To assess the method’s applicability, it is used to calculate the harmonic distortion components (Hn) from the measured output characteristics of several experimental n-MOSFETs with various channel lengths. The resulting values of the harmonic components are compared to, and match very well, those obtained through conventional Fourier analysis techniques. The proposed method’s main appeal is that its implementation is fast and straight forward, and inherently filters out measurement noise. It can be used to calculate distortion harmonics for any desired input level, without having to deal with AC signals or having to perform lengthy Fourier type analysis.