Symbolic Methods in Industrial Analog Circuit Design

Industrial analog circuits are usually designed using numerical simulation tools. To obtain a deeper circuit understanding, symbolic analysis techniques can additionally be applied. Approximation methods which reduce the complexity of symbolic expressions are needed in order to handle industrial-sized problems. This paper describes aspects of the field of symbolic analog circuit analysis. Some state-of-the-art simplification algorithms for linear and nonlinear circuits are presented. The basic ideas behind the different techniques are described and two application examples for the linear and nonlinear case will be demonstrated.