Speed-up and performance evaluation of piecewise-linear DC analysis

The good convergence properties of piecewise-linear (PWL) DC analysis have been thoroughly discussed in many papers. This paper, in turn, concentrates on the speed of PWL DC analysis, where the boundary crossing of linear regions plays a crucial role. Fast methods are presented for performing the following boundary-crossing computations: LU-decomposition update, matrix-equation solution, boundary-crossing direction, and damping-factor determination. Special attention is given to those PWL DC analysis methods that perform PWL modelling of the non-linear components on the fly; an adaptive method is proposed for controlling the accuracy of PWL modelling and speeding up simulation. The computational efficiency of the accelerated PWL DC analysis is discussed and compared with that of conventional, Newton–Raphson iteration-based, DC analysis. Finally, the performance evaluation is completed with realistic simulation examples: it is demonstrated that the speed of the accelerated PWL DC analysis is comparable with that of the conventional DC analysis. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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