Port characteristic and maximum power transfer for diode resistor circuits

This paper deals with the problems of computing port characteristics and maximum power transfer for 1− ports which contain (ideal) diodes, (positive) resistors and sources. The following are the main contributions. 1. An algorithm for solving circuits with (continuous positive slope) piecewise linear devices through repeated solution of circuits with primitive (single corner) versions of such devices. The number of repetitions is bounded above by the product of the number of devices and the product of the logarithms of the number of states (number of corners plus one) in the devices. 2. An adaptation of gradient descent methods for solving circuits with piecewise linear devices. 3. A linear time algorithm for the computation of port characteristic of a series parallel 1− port when the devices are piecewise linear and an approximation (of guaranteed level of accuracy) of the port characteristic when the device port characteristic is known approximately. 4. A simple algorithm for determining the region of validity and the maximum power transfer for a specified state of the diodes. When the number of states is polynomial in the number of diodes in the 1− port, this is used to give a polynomial time algorithm for the port characteristic. 5. An adaptation of efficient interior point methods for the solution of circuits with diodes, resistors and sources