Durbin, F., Haussy, J., Berthiau, G., Siarry, P., and Zuberek, W.M.
Annales des Telecommunications, vol.46, no.3/4, pp.205-215, 1991.
Abstract:
The circuit design problem consists in determining acceptable parameter values (resistors, capacitors, transistor geometries, etc.) which allow the circuit to meet various user given operational criteria (DC consumption, AC bandwidth, transient rise time, etc.). A similar problem deals with efficient transistor parameter determination: BJT, MOS, SOS, SOI, through model fitting to experimental data. This task is equivalent to a multidimensional and/or multiobjective optimization problem: n-variable functions have to be minimized in an hyperrectangular domain; equality and/or inequality constraints can be eventually specified. The paper proposes an efficient annealing to a certain number of p-variable subproblems, with p < n. Objective functions are computed through the modular Spice-Pac simulator which is controlled by the optimization algorithm. The efficiency of large, n-problem splitting into smaller p-subproblems is demonstrated by examples of significant execution time reductions.
Keywords:
Parameter extraction, circuit simulation, nonlinear optimization, simulated annealing, SPICE-PAC.