A NOVEL ALGORITHM FOR DC ANALYSIS OF PIECEWISE-LINEAR CIRCUITS - POPCORN

A fast and convergent iteration method for piecewise-linear analysis o f nonlinear resistive circuits is presented. Most of the existing algo rithms are applicable only to a limited class of circuits. In general, they are either not convergent or too slow for large circuits. The ne w algorithm presented in the paper is much more efficient than the exi sting ones and can be applied to any piecewise-linear circuit. It is b ased on the piecewise-linear version of the Newton-Raphson algorithm. As opposed to the Newton-Raphson method, the new algorithm is globally convergent from an arbitrary starting point. It is simple to understa nd and it can be easily programmed. Some numerical examples are given in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of the amount of computation.