The ever-increasing size of circuits and systems that engineers are designing has led to the development of many special-purpose simulation techniques, e.g., macromodelling. The task of trying to decide the relative merits of various simulation techniques is made difficult by the lack of a unifying framework in which to study the relationship between modelling for simulation and the actual simulation procedures. Moreover, there appears to be a lack of awareness on the part of circuit simulation program developers of the approaches which have been used to solve large-scale problems which arise in other engineering disciplines. The purpose of this paper is three-fold. To review some of the large-scale simulation procedures which have thus far been reported, emphasizing the methods which have not been primarily used for circuit simulation and presenting a unifying structure for analysing simulation procedures; to point to pertinent literature in other engineering disciplines; and to indicate some potentially useful large-scale simulation procedures which have not been previously reported.
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