Optimisation is the process of adjusting a design in order to maximise or minimise some measured characteristic, for example, power consumption or bandwidth. The SIMetrix simulator 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 SIMetrix optimiser operates in the simulator process and an optimisation analysis maybe defined entirely in the netlist. The SIMetrix GUI has additional features to help set up an optimisation analysis and view the results.
| ◄ Specifying Tolerances | Optimiser Modes ▶ |