Fast simulation of weakly nonlinear circuits based on multidimensionalinverse Laplace transform

Abstract

This dissertation presents several solutions on the simulation of weakly nonlinear circuits. The work is motivated by the increasing demand on fast yet accurate simulation methods circuits (IC)s, and the current lack of such methods in the electronic design automation (EDA) / computer-aided design (CAD) community. Three types of frequency domain methods are studied to analyze weakly nonlinear circuits. The first method employs numerical multi-dimensional inverse Laplace transform based on Laguerre function expansion. An adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technique is developed and its parallel implementation is introduced to speed up the computation. The second method applies a Fourier series based algorithm to invert Laplace transform. The algorithm is straightforward to implement, and gives increasing accuracy with increasing number of frequency sampling points. It employs a fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based method to directly invert the frequency domain solution. Its parallel routine is also studied. The third method is based on Gaver functional. It enjoys a high accuracy independent of the number of sampling points, and for multidimensional simulation, only the diagonal points in the matrix are required to be computer, which can be further speeded up by parallel implementation. Numerical results show that the aforementioned three methods enjoy good accuracy as well as high efficiency. A comparative study is carried out to investigate the strengths and drawbacks of each method.