Piecewise linear asymptotic waveform evaluation for transient simulation of electronic circuits

A general purpose circuit simulation program, PL-AWE (piecewise linear asymptotic waveform evaluator) is developed especially for the analysis of VLSI circuits. PL-AWE uses the asymptotic waveform evaluation (AWE) technique, which is a new method to analyze linear(ized) circuits, and piecewise-linear (PL) models to represent nonlinear elements. AWE employs a form of Padeapproximation rather than numerical integration to approximate the behavior of linear(ized) circuits in either the time or the frequency domain. The authors discuss the internal workings of the program, and indicate its effectiveness in terms of several illustrative examples.