Generalization of Circuit Simulator by Automatic Differentiation

Abstract

Circuit simulators have been often used for a power electronic system design. However most of them are limited in their application class to one with fixed elements one because they can only handle programed or fixed element characteristics. To overcome this disadvantage, a simulator should be flexible enough to handle any combination characteristics of available mathematical functions and operations. It is a problem how to compute Jacobian elements or partial derivatives with respect to circuit variables. This paper proposes a way how to compute the derivatives by using the automatic differentiation method which is simple and acurate. The principle and application examples are described.