A Survey of Classical and Recent Results in RLC Circuit Synthesis

Abstract

The motivation provided by mechanical network synthesis to make a fresh attack on certain questions in circuit synthesis will be briefly recalled. The classical early work on RLC synthesis, beginning with the works of Foster and Cauer and culminating in the Bott-Duffin construction, will be explained in a tutorial manner. Recent work on RLC synthesis by Jiang and Smith and Hughes and Smith will be introduced. The proof in T.H. Hughes and M.C. Smith, 2014, " On the minimality and uniqueness of the Bott-Duffin procedure " , IEEE Trans. Aut. Contr., (to appear), showing the surprising result that the Bott-Duffin construction for a biquadratic minimum function is the simplest possible among series-parallel circuits, will be explained.