Electronic Circuit Modeling and Simulation in Modelica

In recent years, three separate efforts took place at three different institutions to provide an electronic circuit modeling and simulation capability within the framework of Modelica, an object-oriented general-purpose environment for the modeling of physical systems. In order to be generally usable, no domain-specific knowledge is hard-coded into the Modelica software. Modelica only understands mathematics, not physics. Consequently, all domainspecific knowledge must be formulated as part of the model. Recent advances in symbolic algorithms and software technology have made it feasible to implement a full-fledged electronic circuit simulator in Modelica without making unacceptable sacrifices on the runtime efficiency of the resulting simulation code. What is being gained in the process is an improved transparency of the models that are being implemented, a significantly improved ease of maintainability and extensibility of the code, and a dramatically improved flexibility in combining electronic models with mechanical and thermal models. These are demands that industry now makes on a circuit simulator, demands that cannot easily be met using the traditional approach to electronic circuit simulation.