Finding DC operating points of nonlinear circuits is an important and difficult task. The Newton-Raphson method adopted in the SPICE-like simulators often fails to converge to a solution. To overcome this convergence problem, homotopy methods have been studied from various viewpoints. However, most previous studies are mainly focused on the bipolar transistor circuits and no paper presents the global convergence theorems of homotopy methods for MOS transistor circuits. Moreover, due to the improvements and advantages of MOS transistor technologies, extending the homotopy methods to MOS transistor circuits becomes more and more necessary and important. This paper proposes two nonlinear homotopy methods for MOS transistor circuits and proves the global convergence theorems for the proposed MOS nonlinear homotopy method II. Numerical examples show that both of the two proposed homotopy methods for MOS transistor circuits are more effective for finding DC operating points than the conventional MOS homotopy method and they are also capable of finding DC operating points for large-scale circuits.

The compound element pseudo-transient analysis (PTA) algorithm is an effective practical method for finding the DC operating point when the Newton-Raphson method fails. It is able to effectively prevent from the oscillation problems compared with conventional PTA algorithms. In this paper, an effective SPICE3 implementation method for the compound element PTA algorithm is proposed. It has the characteristic of not expanding the Jacobian matrix and not changing the Jacobian matrix structure when the pseudo-transient numerical simulation is being done. Thus a high simulation efficiency is guaranteed. The ability of the proposed SPICE3 implementation to avoid the oscillation problems and the simulation efficiency are demonstrated by examples.