Variation range based simplification for meaningful symbolic analysis of analog integrated circuits

Abstract

This paper presents a variation range based symbolic simplification technique, where each circuit parameter is represented via a range of variation. We generate a database to handle the variation ranges of the circuit parameters and perform simulated annealing algorithm to achieve the most compact symbolic expressions. In contrast to the existing techniques, the main advantage of the proposed method is that the simplified symbolic expressions have an acceptable generalizability in the whole ranges of variations of the circuit parameters. The maximum allowable simplification error can be controlled by the user based on the required accuracy level that he needs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the conventional techniques in terms of expression complexity, accuracy and generalizability of the simplified expressions. The resultant expressions are only as complicated as necessary to give the required accuracy in the results, which help in giving a better insight into the circuit behavior.