Two-Stage Newton–Raphson Method for Transistor-Level Simulation

In this paper, we introduce an efficient transistor-level simulation tool with SPICE-accuracy for deep-submicrometer very large-scale integration circuits with strong-coupling effects. The new approach uses multigrid for huge networks of power/ground, clock, and interconnect with strong coupling. Mutual inductance can be incorporated without error-prone matrix sparsification approximations or expensive matrix inversion. Transistor devices are integrated using a novel two-stage Newton-Raphson method to dynamically model the linear network and nonlinear devices boundary. Orders-of-magnitude speedup over Berkeley SPICE3 is observed for sets of real deep-submicrometer design circuits