Numerical Simulation of Electronic Systems Based on Circuit- Block Partitioning Strategies

Numerical simulation of complex and heterogeneous electronic systems can be a very challenging issue. Circuits composed of a combination of analog, mixed-signal and digital blocks or even radio frequency (RF) blocks, integrated in the same substrate, are very difficult to simulate as a whole at the circuit level. The main reason is because they contain a lot of state variables presenting very distinct properties and evolving in very widely separated time scales. Examples of practical interest are systems-on-a-chip (SoCs), very common in mobile electronics applications, as well as in many other embedded electronic systems. This chapter is intended to briefly review some advanced circuit-level numerical simulation techniques based on circuit-block partitioning schemes, which were especially designed to address the simulation challenges brought by this kind of circuits into the computer-aided-design (CAD) field.