General-purpose piecewise-linear DC analysis

Finding the DC solution of a nonlinear circuit is one of the most important tasks in circuit simulation. The convergence problems of the conventional DC analysis can be partly avoided by using piecewise-linear analysis. In the traditional piecewise-linear DC analysis, nonlinear components must be first approximated with continuous piecewise-linear functions. In this paper a new piecewise-linear DC analysis method, where piecewise-linear modeling of nonlinear components is combined with analysis, is proposed. The method proposed has been implemented in the APLAC circuit simulator.