Recent Development in Symbolic Analysis: An Overview

Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of the state of the art on symbolic analysis techniques for modeling, synthesis, design and verification of analog integrated circuits. Symbolic analysis is to generate analytic expressions for circuit performances in terms of circuit component parameters and frequency variables. It complements very well the results from numerical analysis for analog circuit designs. Furthermore, symbolic analysis is very instrumental for circuit designers to gain insights into the circuit’s behavior for generating compact and behavioral models suitable for circuit sizing and synthesis. It is important towards the automatic analog synthesis and optimization. The chapter presents major developments in this field over the past several years and concludes with the outstanding problems for future research.

Keywords: Symbolic nodal analysis, behavioral modeling, active device, nullor, simplification approaches, determinant decision diagram, sparse matrix, model order reduction, moment matching, balanced truncation.