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Abstract

Finding operating points of circuits is a crucial first step for simulation and verification. Traditional operating point analyses such as homotopy analysis do find an operating point. However, a circuit may have many DC equilibria, and failing to consider an unintended initial condition can lead to failures escaping to the physical silicon. This work presents a method for finding all DC equilibrium points; this approach is based on interval-arithmetic-based verification algorithms; and our open-source implementation supports state-of-the-art short-channel device models. This work also presents what we believe to be the first, completely automatic verification of the Rambus ring-oscillator start-up problem. Our method offers large performance and scalability advantages when compared with the dReal and Z3 SMT solvers.