Today’s consumer products rely heavily on small electronic circuits to provide much of their
functionality. Each of these circuits is built around electrical components that, like all
devices, vary in value due to variations in materials, manufacturing, and operating
conditions. For example, capacitors are notoriously variable often operating as much as
/ 20% from their nominal value. Clearly, a variation in capacitor value can have an
affect on the operation of an electronic circuit. If the statistical properties of the capacitor
and resistor value distributions are known, stochastic methods can be used to compute this
effect. Unfortunately, this is often not the case and we are frequently left to use empirical
methods to determine this effect. A common technique is to use a Monte Carlo method
where a circuit will be built (or simulated) many times with different components from a lot
and the resulting behavior analyzed. The goal will be to determine a confidence value that a
randomly selected circuit built with these components will behave within a certain interval.