Development of Continuation Methods for Circuit Simulation at Bell Laboratories

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The Simulation and Modeling Group at AT&T Bell Laboratories has recently created a circuit simulator for dc simulation of their in- house integrated circuits. This simulator, called SFRAME has a number of advantages over Newton-Raphson-based simulation programs such as SPICE. These advantages include global convergence, the ability to find more than one or sometimes even all of a circuit's operating points, and the ability to incorporate the sophisticated bipolar junction transistor models used at Bell Laboratories; running SPICE on circuits incorporating these models has led to severe convergence problems. This research will affect major enhancements to SFRAME, including initialization capability, ability to simulate circuits containing MOS transistors, and identification of the stability of operating points found. It is expected that the work proposed herein will be a starting point for a long and productive industry-university collaboration.