Novel Technique for the Analysis of Electronic Circuits Including Zener Diodes

Abstract

This paper addresses the analysis of electronic circuits including Zener diodes. It starts with a modified Zener diode model, which is based on expressions involving step-functions, its parameters such as the resistances in both current directions as well as its breakdown (or Zener) voltage. In contrast to the earlier approaches expressing the sharp discontinuities characterizing the step-functions in terms of inverse hyperbolic tangent terms, this paper adopts more concise and efficient approximations in terms of simpler exponential expressions. A compact Mathematica code written in the Versions 7.0 and 12.2 is derived and implemented. It investigates the time-domain analysis of representative case studies including Zener diodes. The computer simulation yields the circuits’ currents and voltages as functions of time resulting from the switching of step-voltage sources.