Identifying design glitches through automated design analysis

Engineers have developed a number of design techniques in order to detect problems in their designs, such as yellow-boarding, FMECA, FTA and sneak circuit analysis. Concurrent engineering demands that all such design analysis activities are carried out in a timely manner-instantaneously would be ideal. For electrical systems incorporating some electronics, many such techniques can be automated using qualitative simulation to generate appropriate results. There are two main advantages of using qualitative simulation over using numerical simulation in tools such as SPICE or SABER. The first advantage is that the analysis can be performed early in the design lifecycle, identifying problems when it is less costly to fix them. The second advantage is that component models are easy to specify and are highly reusable when compared with models built in SPICE or SABER.