Summarizing Qualitative Behavior from Measurements of NonlinearsCircuits

Abstract

This report describes a program which automatically characterizes the behavior of any driven, nonlinear, electrical circuit. To do this, the program autonomously selects interesting input parameters, drives the circuit, measures its response, performs a set of numeric computations on the measured data, interprets the results, and decomposes the circuit's parameter space into regions of qualitatively distinct behavior. The output is a two-dimensional portrait summarizing the high-level, qualitative behavior of the circuit for every point in the graph, an accompanying textual explanation describing any interesting patterns observed in the diagram, and a symbolic description of the circuit's behavior which can be passed on to other programs for further analysis.