ABSTRACT
The late 1980s and 1990s saw a heightened interest in the development of symbolic analysis techniques and their applications to integrated circuits analysis and design. This trend continues in the new millennium. It resulted in the current generation of symbolic analysis methods, which include several software implementations like ISSAC [Gie89], SCAPP [Has89], ASAP [Fer91], EASY [Som91], SYNAP [Sed88], SAPWIN [Lib95], SCYMBAL [Kon88], GASCAP [Hue89], SSPICE [Wie89], STAINS [Pie01], and Analog Insydes [Hen00]. This generation is characterized by an emphasis on the production of usable software packages and a large interest in the application of the methods to the area of analog circuit design. This includes extensive efforts to reduce the number of symbolic expression generated by the analysis through hierarchical methods and approximation techniques [Fer92,Sed92,Wam92,Hsu94, Yu96]. This generation also includes attempts at applying symbolic analysis to analog circuit synthesis [Gie91,Cab98], parallel processor implementations [Has93b,Mat93,Weh93], time-domain analysis [Has91,Als93,Lib93], and behavioral signal path modeling [Ley00]. The details of traditional symbolic analysis techniques as they apply to linear circuit theory are given in
[Rod08]. This chapter addresses symbolic analysis as a computer-aided design tool and its application to integrated circuit design. Modern symbolic analysis is mainly based on either a topological approach or a modified nodal analysis (MNA) approach. The basic topological (graph-based) methodologies are discussed in [Rod08] because the methods are part of traditional symbolic analysis techniques. The methodology addressed in this chapter is based on the concept of MNA [Ho75] as it applies to symbolic analysis.
