The generation of the reference current waveform is the key technique of the design of the nonlinear electronic load. The harmonic information has to be known when the harmonic superposition method is adopted. By this method, the simulation of nonlinear load with arbitrary parameter can not be realized. In order to solve the limitation of the traditional method, by taking the rectification circuit for example, a method of generating the reference current waveform based on analyzing the equation of state of the circuit and the load parameter is presented. In the hardware realization, an algorithm combining the CORDIC with the interpolation is adopted for the speed and resource factors, thus reducing the consumption of clock period and hardware resource. The simulation done with MATLAB and Quartus II software shows that the use of this method can generate the nonlinear electronic load reference current waveform consistent with the theoretical current waveform by consuming less clock period and hardware resource.