Abstract: “Electrical devices often use RC, LC or RLC circuit to design power amplifiers, filters and mixers etc. Complex iterative algorithms are used for the simulation of these circuits. . This paper illustrates numerical experiments on growth of rounding off error in simulation of simple RC circuit using fourth order Runge-Kutta method (RK) and the Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg with adaptive step size control method (RKF). Our analysis indicates that in simulations with RK method, round off error grows ~ 80% with 10-15 iterations and ~96-98% within 100 iterations with different step sizes and double precision. In the simulations with RKF method round off error grows to 70% with 10-20 iterations and ~80% within 100 iterations. It does not exceed 80% for 1000 of iterations for single and double precision. This indicates that growth of round off error in RKF method is less and it should be used to minimize round off error.”

Keywords: Simulation of RC circuit, Round off error, Runge Kutta methods