Symbolic analysis in analog integrated circuit design: an application example

The traditional design of analog integrated circuits relies largely on a mixture of expertise, some manual calculations, and numerical circuit simulation. Recent research and development in the field of symbolic circuit analysis has produced results which may have considerable impact on some parts of the traditional design flow, but few analog designers have adopted symbolic analysis techniques as standard tools in their CAD environments yet. To a large extent this may be due to the lack of documented methodologies which show what can be expected from symbolic analysis and how it can be efficiently employed to solve industrial circuit design problems. In this paper, the application of symbolic analysis and computer algebra to such a design problem is demonstrated. It will be shown how symbolic analysis can help to better understand a circuit in order to improve the quality of the design