Finding Beneficial DAE Structures in Circuit Simulation

Circuit simulation is a standard task for the computer-aided design of electronic circuits. The transient analysis is well understood and realized in powerful simulation packages for conventional circuits. But further developments in the production engineering lead to new classes of circuits which may cause difficulties for the numerical integration. The dimension of circuit models can be quite large (105 equations). The complexity of the models demands a higher abstraction level. In this paper, we analyze electric circuits with respect to their structural properties. We discuss the relevant subspaces of the resulting differential algebraic equations (DAEs) and present algorithms for calculating the index as well as consistent initial values.