An Event-Driven System-Level Noise Analysis Methodology for RF Systems

This paper presents an approach for a system-level noise simulation in the frequency domain for RF systems. The noise analysis is able to depict frequency conversion due to nonlinear or time-varying circuits and can also consider the signal processing in the digital part. Therefore, it is possible to analyze the noise from all parts of the system at a point of choice, e.g. directly at the demodulator input. The approach is based on analog models of the genuine circuit level implementation used for system level exploration or verification purpose. It can be integrated in a conventional system level simulation with nearly no overhead. The noise analysis is implemented on top of an already existing event-driven RF simulation approach which uses a combination of System Verilog and C++ for modeling. MATLAB is used for post-processing and visualization of the results.