An Efficient Transient Nonlinear Circuit Simulator Using Exponential Integration and Block-Jacobi Precondition

Abstract: Transient simulation of linear and nonlinear circuits remains an important task in modern EDA tools. At present, SPICE-like simulators face challenges in parallelization, nonlinear convergence and linear efficiency, especially when applied to large-scale circuits. To address the limitations of simulators in handling various nonlinear circuits, we adopt a generalized row-echelon regularization approach, which extends the applicability of exponential integrators to a broader class of differential algebraic equations. The proposed method employs matrix exponential vector products to integrate the regularized system, allowing for a larger time step size while preserving accuracy and stability. Furthermore, in order to accelerate GMRES-based solvers within Newton-Raphson iterations, a structured block-Jacobi preconditioner is designed for linear systems. For locally coupled circuits, Additive Schwarz overlapping strategy is adopted to enhance the solution performance. Numerical experiments of various nonlinear circuit models show that under same hardware environment, our method achieves a speedup of 1.95$\times$-- 3.27$\times$ in total computation time compared to Backward Euler with Inexact Newton iterations, and time steps have decreased by an average of 60.70\% (up to 74.59\%). Compared with EI-NK method, total computing time of our method has a speedup of 1.08$\times$-- 1.79$\times$. These results highlight the potential of proposed method for scalable and nonlinear circuit simulation.