In this paper we propose a general transistor equivalent model structure especially suited for calculating distortion contributions in a nonlinear circuit. All device-internal nonlinearities are reduced into four polynomial nonlinear sources in the input and output ports of the transistor, resulting in a nonlinear generalization of a transistor y-parameter model. This canonical structure makes distortion contribution analysis independent of the actual structure of the device models, and greatly simplifies the interpretation of the results. In this paper we show how the proposed model can be extracted from the simulated data for either quasi-static or non-quasi-static device models.