Introduction

Optimisation is the process of adjusting a design in order to maximise or minimise some measured characteristic, for example, power consumption or bandwidth. SIMetrix and SIMetrix/SIMPLIS includes an optimisation feature that will perform this process automatically once the characteristic to be optimised (the 'objective function') has been defined along with the parameters that may be varied during the optimisation process. In addition, any number of constraints may also be defined. A constraint is an inequality relationship to define some measurement to be above or below a specified value. For example, the objective function might be to minimise power consumption (the objective) of an amplifier but retaining a minimum bandwidth and maximum noise factor (the constraints).

The optimiser works with both SIMetrix and SIMPLIS simulators and the optimisation measurements (for the objective and constraints) may be made using multiple analyses if required.

The optimiser may be setup using a simple GUI while the final results are generated in the form of an HTML report.