TY - JOUR
T1 - Mixed-technology system-level simulation
AU - Martinez, J. A.
AU - Kurzweg, T. P.
AU - Levitan, S. P.
AU - Marchand, P. J.
AU - Chiarulli, D. M.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by DARPA, under Grant No. F3602-97-2-0122 and NSF, under Grants No. ECS-9616879 and CCR-9988319.
Funding Information:
Philippe J. Marchand received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Haute Alsace, Mulhouse (France) in 1986, 1987 and 1991 respectively. From 1991 through 1999, he was a research scientist and senior lecturer at the University of California, San Diego with the Optoelectronic Computing Group. His research interests included optical 2-D and 3-D storage, computer generated holography and diffractive optics, optical system design and packaging, optical free-space interconnections, parallel architectures and their applications to parallel optoelectronic computing and telecommunication switching. At UCSD, he worked on developing 3-D packaging technologies for optoelectronic systems and he concurrently worked on the development of models for optoelectronic CAD tools in relation with the University of Pittsburgh. He was a principal investigator for the DARPA funded 3D-OESP Consortium whose goal was to integrated 3D-VLSI and parallel free-space optoelectronic technologies. Since November 1999, he has joined OMM, Inc. as a project director where he is heading the R&D efforts for the development of 3D based MEMS switches. Philippe Marchand has published over 130 articles and papers in refereed journals and scientific meetings, and he holds five patents. He received a Lavoisier fellowship in 1990 from the French Foreign Ministry, the 1991 ADRERUS Thesis prize for his Ph.D. work, and a best paper award at the 1997 Design Automation Conference in Las Vegas. He is a member of IEEE, OSA, and SPIE.
PY - 2001
Y1 - 2001
N2 - This paper describes a computationally efficient method to simulate mixed-domain systems under the requirements of a system-level framework. The approach is the combined use of Modified Nodal Analysis (MNA) for the representation of a mixed-technology device and piecewise linear (PWL) techniques to overcome the costly numerical evaluation found in conventional circuit or device simulators. This approach makes the simulation computationally fast, as well as more stable when compared with traditional circuit simulation. The PWL solver, based in the frequency domain, is more robust to inconsistencies in initial conditions and impulse changes when compared to integration based solvers in the time domain. The advantage of this method is that the same solver enables the integration of multi-domain devices (e.g., electrical, optical, and mechanical) in the same simulation framework. The use of this technique for the simulation of multi-domain systems has proven to give better performance in simulation time when compared to traditional circuit simulators with a relatively small decrease in the level of accuracy. Comparisons with traditional solvers, such as SPICE, show two to three orders of magnitude speedup with less than 5% relative error. The ability to adjust the level of accuracy, either by varying the sampling rate or the number of regions of operation in the models, allows for both computationally fast and in-depth analysis in the same CAD framework.
AB - This paper describes a computationally efficient method to simulate mixed-domain systems under the requirements of a system-level framework. The approach is the combined use of Modified Nodal Analysis (MNA) for the representation of a mixed-technology device and piecewise linear (PWL) techniques to overcome the costly numerical evaluation found in conventional circuit or device simulators. This approach makes the simulation computationally fast, as well as more stable when compared with traditional circuit simulation. The PWL solver, based in the frequency domain, is more robust to inconsistencies in initial conditions and impulse changes when compared to integration based solvers in the time domain. The advantage of this method is that the same solver enables the integration of multi-domain devices (e.g., electrical, optical, and mechanical) in the same simulation framework. The use of this technique for the simulation of multi-domain systems has proven to give better performance in simulation time when compared to traditional circuit simulators with a relatively small decrease in the level of accuracy. Comparisons with traditional solvers, such as SPICE, show two to three orders of magnitude speedup with less than 5% relative error. The ability to adjust the level of accuracy, either by varying the sampling rate or the number of regions of operation in the models, allows for both computationally fast and in-depth analysis in the same CAD framework.
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U2 - 10.1023/A:1011294616831
DO - 10.1023/A:1011294616831
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0035478259
VL - 29
SP - 127
EP - 149
JO - Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing
JF - Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing
SN - 0925-1030
IS - 1-2
ER -