Symbolic circuit analysis techniques help designers gain a better
understanding of circuit behavior. To date, only symbolic analysis
of linear or small-signal linearized circuits in the frequency domain
is possible—both for continuous-time and discrete-time (switched)
analog circuits. Exact symbolic solutions for network functions
are too complex for linearized circuits of practical size, and even
impossible to calculate for many nonlinear effects. Since the late
1980s, dedicated symbolic analysis tools have been developed that
use heuristic simplification and pruning algorithms, as a means to
reduce the complexity of the resulting expressions and retain only
the dominant contributions within user-controlled error tolerances.
This has resulted in recent years in an algorithmic breakthrough,
ushering in techniques of simplification that highly reduce the
computation time and, therefore, enable symbolic analysis of
large analog circuits of practical size. We can expect to see
symbolic analysis techniques soon merging into the commercial
electronic design automation (EDA) marketplace as a standard
designer tool