| Abstract: | A new efficient algorithm is presented for finding all driving-point characteristic (DP) and transfer characteristic (TC) plots for a broad class of piecewise-linear (PWL) resistive circuits without the need for initial points for each solution branch. the piecewise-linear circuits to be considered need not be continuous nor need their linear regions be divided by grid-like hyperplanes. the computation of the new algorithm is based on zone-by-zone instead of the conventional region-by-region. Since each zone includes several regions and only one matrix inversion is needed for each zone, a significant reduction of computation can be achieved. Furthermore, the computational complexity for finding all solution branches, i.e. finding the DC operating points over the entire range of input values u, is no more than for finding all DC operating points over a single value u as far as the number of matrices needed to be inverted is concerned. |
