An efficient piecewise-linear DC analysis method for general non-linear circuits

The convergence problems of conventional DC analysis can be partly avoided by using piecewise-linear analysis. This paper proposes a piecewise-linear DC analysis method that can efficiently handle arbitrary couplings between non-linear circuit elements. Piecewise-linear modelling of the non-linear circuit elements is automatically performed during simulation, using simplicial subdivisions. The number of linear regions, and thereby iterations, is considerably reduced by combining the common parts of separate simplicial subdivisions. Due to these reasons and since the method is formulated with the commonly used modified nodal approach, it has been possible to implement the method in the general-purpose circuit simulator APLAC. The correct operation of the method is demonstrated with three examples. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.