Latency exploitation in circuit simulation by sparse matrix techniques

The most important operations for a circuit simulator are component model linearization, updating the network matrix, performing large unsymmetric decomposition on this matrix, and solving the network variables by forward and backward substitution. Methods are presented to keep all these operations localized to the part of the network that is active at the current time point, thus obtaining a considerable reduction in computational effort. The methods depend upon the sparse matrix structure itself, yielding a very effective fine-grained latency use, contrary to methods based on the large blocks specified by the circuit hierarchy. Results obtained from an implementation of the algorithms in a piecewise linear circuit simulator with an implicit multirate integration scheme are presented.<>