The use of a matrix cache to speed up the conventional transient simulation of piecewise linear circuits

Abstract

This paper presents a few techniques based on an efficient use of memory resources to speed up the transient analysis of piecewise linear circuits, such as power electronic circuits. These techniques use the fact that the matrix in the linear equation solving routines can only have a finite number of different values. Hence, by adding a cache memory management technique to store the LU factor of these matrices for future reuse, the linear equation solver can be performed much faster than that of a general purpose simulation program in which these LU factors have to be recomputed every time. Since most of the CPU analysis time is spent in solving linear equations, these techniques can actually speed up the transient analysis of piecewise linear circuits significantly (100-600%).