Kirchoff Law Markov Fields for Analog Circuit Design

Three contributions to developing an algorithm for assisting engineers indesigning analog circuits are provided in this paper. First, a method for representing highly nonlinear and noncontinuous analog circuits using Kirchoff current law potential functions within the context of a Markov field is described. Second, a relatively efficient algorithmfor optimizing the Markov field objective function is briefly described and the convergence proof is briefly sketched. And third, empirical results illustrating the strengths and limitations ofthe approach are provided within the context of a JFET transistor design problem. The proposed algorithm generated a set of circuit components for the JFET circuit model that accurately generated the desired characteristic curves. 1 Analog circuit design using Markov random fields