mantevo/minixyce

miniXyce Circuit Design Mini-Application

miniXyce Linear Circuit Simulator

At this time, miniXyce is a simple linear circuit simulator with a basic parser that performs transient analysis on any circuit with resistors (R), inductors (L), capacitors (C), and voltage/current sources. The parser incorporated into this version of miniXyce is a single pass parser, where the netlist is expected to be flat (no hierarchy via subcircuits is allowed). Simulating the system of DAEs generates a nonsymmetric linear problem, which is solved using un-preconditioned GMRES. The time integration method used in miniXyce is backward Euler with a constant time-step. The simulator outputs all the solution variables at each time step in a 'prn' file.

The development of the first version of miniXyce resulted in something closer to a compact application than a miniapp since more focus was put on the simulator returning the correct answer, than modeling performance characteristics of interest. Further analysis of Xyce has called out particular performance issues in each of the three phases of circuit simulation: parsing, device evaluation/loading, and the solution of linear equations. These issues will inspire enhancements to, and a second version of, miniXyce.