e who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in. -Richard Feynmann Mathematics is too important to be left to the mathematicians. -David Hestenes he ability to analyze system or circuit behavior is one of the key requirements for successful design. To put an idea to work, a designer needs both the knowledge and tools for analyzing the behavior of that new system architecture or that experi- mental circuit topology. Design decisions are grounded on the results obtained from analysis. Producing dedicated methods for analyzing each particular problem at hand is of course inefficient. It's like reinventing the wheel time and again. Therefore, successful meth- ods should be applicable to large classes of system and circuit behavior. This implies a classification that makes abstraction of the underlying implementation details. This process of abstraction can be considered as a formalization of design knowledge. This formalization is important for two reasons: in the short run, it speeds up the future design of similar systems by enabling us to reuse exsiting methods; in the long run, it eases a transfer of knowledge to generations to come. This book reports on research in the field of methods for modeling and analysis of telecommunication frontends and their building blocks. In doing so, it deals with fun- damental theory and algorithms for behavioral model extraction. 1.1 Structured analysis, a key to successful design 1.1.1 Electronics, a competitive market Since the birth of the first transistor at Bell-Labs (1947) over the creation of the first in- tegrated circuit (IC) at Texas Instruments (1958), electronics has experienced a tremen- dous growth, both technologically and economically. Fig. 1.1 shows both the evolution of the transistor dimensions and the transistor count of the Intel processors over the last couple of deca