Relaxation-based transient sensitivity computations for MOSFET circuits

In this paper, we propose two new methods for computing the transient sensitivities of large scale MOSFET circuits, which exploit the relaxation-based circuit simulation techniques, the waveform relaxation (WR) method and the iterated timing analysis (ITA) method. Sufficient conditions are stated and proven, which are quite mild for MOSFET circuits, for convergence of these new methods. A pruning scheme, which prunes the sensitivity circuits, takes the positions of the design parameters as well as the outputs of interest into account and saves any redundant subcircuit computation even though that subcircuit may not be latent. By modifying the original WR and ITA algorithms, we also present practical computational algorithms which can process multiple design parameters. These practical algorithms retain most of the structures of the original algorithms, which can easily be implemented into available relaxation-based circuit simulators. These new methods have been implemented and the experimental results for several circuits are shown to demonstrate their effectiveness. >