A Multi-Level Simulation Technique for Large-ScaleAnalog Integrated Circuits

This paper describes a multi-level simulation technique and its implementation, which accurately solve voltages and currents of circuits descreibed at mixed levels of abstractions. A metho to form a tightly coupled simulation environment is proposed and, starting from a description of a circuit, simulation set-up and analysis procedure of the multi-level simulator for a transient response are presented. Circuit and behavioral simulation techniques and their implementations composing the multi-level simulation are explained in detail. Most of the algorithms implemented in the simulation are based upon the standard simulation techniques in order to obtain the reliability and accuracy of conventinoal simulators. Simulation examples show that the multi-level simulator can analyze circuits containing highly nonlinear behavioral models without loss of accuracy provided the behavioral models are accurate enough.