An Implementation of a Matrix Cache to Speed up the Conventional Transient Simulation of Piecewise Linear Circuits

A few techniques based on an efficient use of memory resources, called matrix caches, to speed up the transient analysis of piecewise linear circuits such as power electronic circuits are presented. These techniques use the fact that the matrix in the linear equation solving routines can only have a finite number of different values. Hence, by adding a cache memory management technique to store the LU factor of these matrices for future reuse, the linear equation solver can be performed much faster than that of a general purpose simulation program in which these LU factors have to be recomputed every time. Since most of the CPU analysis time is spent in solving linear equations, these techniques can actually speed up the transient analysis of piecewise linear circuits significantly. An experimental circuit simulator has been developed to implement the matrix cache and tested with a few piecewise linear power electronic circuits. The results indicate a speed increase of 2–10 times as compared with its non-matrix cache version.