During the development of VLSI-circuits the designers use different tools for simulation of the electrical behavior of the circuit. The aspects covered with this tools are functional, timing, logic, circuit, device and process simulation.
This work presents the new program JANAP - Just Another Network Simulation Program - for simulation of the transient behavior of electrical circuits. The most important features of JANAP are an application oriented user interface, extensive support to define models of real devices with different accuracy (models can range from device up to macromodels) and no restriction on the description of electrical circuits, as long as there are no physical reasons. JANAP enables modeling of the real behavior of real devices with nonlinear functions and tables. The use of a switch is possible too.
To solve the problems which result from the extreme nonlinearities, e.g. the well known charge conservation problem in circuits with capacitors and switches, a new formulation of the equation system, which describes the electrical behaviour of the ciruit, the complete tableau approach has been introduced. The complete tableau approach is an extension of the well known sparse tableau approach. A new basic element, the universal element, has been introduced. All other basic elements can be described using the universal element. To solve the nonlinear algebraic stiff differential equation system which describes the circuit state of the art methods are used.
The functionality and the new features of the implemented computer program is demonstrated by selected examples. Circuits which cannot simulated with one of the classic circuit simulation program such as SPICE can be simulated without any problems with JANAP.
The influence of the novel features offered by JANAP on the technics to model real devices and standard circuits requires more investigations.