Circuit performance optimization and model fitting based on simulated annealing

An efficient new method, based on the coupling between an enhanced simulated annealing algorithm and the SPICE-PAC ‘open’ circuit simulator, is proposed for minimizing objective functions describing circuit performance optimization problems or component model fitting to experimental data. To keep the number of objective function evaluations and CPU times to the lowest possible level, we focus our attention on two features: first, we build an original partitioning technique for splitting large n-dimensional problems; then we carefully study variables discretization, (which is necessary for applying the simulated annealing method to continuous problems). To illustrate the efficiency of our method, we show how to determine the 40 MOS transistor model parameters, through fitting the model to experimental data.