NEWS for the group
Hi all,
Some news for the group.
1) The letter to CAD Group ?
Can someone send me the draft. Prof. Vincentelli is "waiting it". He
offered us to be our "ambassador" (well, not so officially) with
Berkeley's people. He asked for a small paper describing our work and our
directions to obtain the permission to link our pages to the EECS site,
giving us credit. I think that we should ride the wave.
2) Bug fixing and debauch
Debauch seems very good. I have tried it (sorry, not yet with Arno's
script) and removed a couple of bugs (as in my previous message). I
encourage other people to use it, it is a very good piece of software, but
be prepared to uge output.There are some bugs that you cannot close simply
by putting a free(), in these cases the program structure should be
altered.
3) Improvements
In his seminar Sangiovanni ha pointed some ways to improve spice3f:
a) Sparse package: He stated that the sparse1.3a found on netlib
repository is better (numerically more robust) than the one
included in spice sources. We should include this one.
A friend of mine here in Rome (Pierpaolo Pierozzi) is working
on it.
b) Jacobian: In the calculation of the jacobian, spice3f makes an
unnecessary matrix/vector multiplication ,where a simple
matrix + delta update should be more performant. We should
investigate in this direction.
c) LTE: This calculus is buggy. It works because of bugs. The constant
TRTOL (tuned to 7) conflicts with theory. I have not understood this
point, if someone is interested I (or him/her) can write Vincentelli
about it.
d) Charge: Spice does not conserve the charge. The problem relies on
capacitors modeling. This will be a great improvement.
4) Documentation:
Search the Vincentelli's home page at Berkeley, it should be
http://www.eecs.berkeley.ed/~alberto, and download E219A lectures,
they are very interesting and explain how a circuit simulator
should be built.
That's all folks
Paolo
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