Application of FFT-PEEC Method for Nonlinear Inductance Extraction

This paper shows how the recently proposed Partial Element Equivalent Circuit (PEEC) method accelerated by the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) (i.e., the FFT-PEEC method) can be efficiently adopted for the extraction of inductances when nonlinear ferromagnetic materials are involved. An efficient and simplified strategy for the inductance extraction by means of FFT-PEEC is proposed in order to speed-up the parameter extraction for many coil-current values. Such tool finds practical applications in the modelling of electromagnetic devices where the magnetic saturation of ferromagnetic media may be an undesirable phenomenon which, however, cannot be neglected, e.g., in power electronics or integrated inductors. Moreover, such tool can be particularly useful during the design of electronic devices which exploit saturation effects, such as voltage regulators, tunable core inductors, magnetic amplifiers, and fluxgate magnetometers.