In recent years, three separate efforts took place at three different institutions to provide an electronic circuit modeling and simulation capability within the framework of Modelica, an object-oriented general-purpose environment for the modeling of physical systems.

For many years now, special-purpose software tools for the simulation of electronic circuits have been developed and have been successfully applied by both academia and industry to accurately and efficiently simulate large-scale electronic circuits.  Why is there suddenly a push for the utilization of a general-purpose modeling and simulation environment in its place?

Modelica is an object-oriented modeling language specifically designed for modeling physical systems.  In order to be generally usable, no domain-specific knowledge is hard-coded into the software.  Modelica only understands mathematics, not physics.  Consequently, all domain-specific knowledge must be formulated as part of the model.

The object-oriented modeling paradigm makes this feasible, as details of domain-knowledge that are of no immediate concern to the end user can be hidden within component models that are stored in a model library that is being maintained by domain experts.

Recent advances in symbolic algorithms and software technology have made it feasible to implement a full-fledged electronic circuit simulator in Modelica without making unacceptable sacrifices on the run-time efficiency of the resulting simulation code.

What is being gained in the process is an improved transparency of the models that are being implemented, a significantly improved ease of maintainability and extensibility of the code, and a dramatically improved flexibility in combining electronic models with mechanical and thermal models.  These are demands that industry now makes on a circuit simulator, demands that cannot easily be met using the traditional approach to electronic circuit simulation.

This survey paper offers a state-of-the-art review of where we currently are in terms of providing a tool that meets the demands of the market place, and where additional research and development efforts need to be invested.