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 [16], SCAPP [21], ASAP [13], EASY [45], SYNAP [43], SAPWIN [33], SCYMBAL [29], GASCAP [27], SSPICE [53], STAINS [42], and Analog Insydes. 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 [14, 26, 44, 54, 55]. This generation also includes attempts at applying symbolic analysis to analog circuit synthesis [10, 17], parallel processor implementations [24, 40, 52], time domain analysis [2, 22, 34], and behavioral signal path modeling [32].
