Re: [ng-spice-devel] Re: snapshot/resimulate
On Wed, 04 Apr 2001, Jon Engelbert wrote:
> On Microsoft Windows, the Data Access Objects (DAO) libraries make
> it possible to store simulation data into a database. DAO is
just to add fire to the flames...
simulation output data can be considered highly
structured, and custom access routines can provide
very significant speed/space advantages over a generic
database (analgous to the current situation).
and, if the data is large (multigigabyte), storage
overhead can be a big limiting factor (the speed argument
is a reiteration of Mr. Davis's comments).
however, post simulation, and post analysis (eg, results
of .measures, etc), can benefit significantly from
access to some kind of database.
it is frequently advantageous to be able to exercise circuits
with a variety of stimulus and conditions, and to be able
to draw trends of key aspects of analysis results (eg,
vco freq vs temp, voltage, etc.
spice2/3 attempt to incorporate some aspect of this large
scale stimulus/parameter variation (eg, sweeps, .alter), but this
is actually better left to a higher level driver program,
that can keep the results of the analysis stored away in
some sort of database routine, keyed under the simulation
conditions.
a link to gnuplot, mathlab, etc, of these 'second-order'
results is very valuable.
there are several examples of peoples attempts to drive
spice from tcl or perl (the non-berkeley (john maneatis?)
jspice at stanford), or even directly incorporate a perl
interface (eg, antrim), to atain this higher level control
of conditions/analysis.
lastly, suggesting incorporation of any microsoft code
in an open-source endeavor is quite ironic...
as a chip designer, i would say that 90-100% of chip design
is unix hosted, not windows hosted. test circuits in
educational settings are one thing, tying spice deep into
large scale cad flows requires an operating system with
more capable fundamentals, eg, unix (cygwin not withstanding).
(i've been in many companies that have an nt-network for
email/corporate-is, and an array of sparc servers and linux
boxes on engineer's desks for hosting the cad tools).
-elh
Partial thread listing:
- Re: [ng-spice-devel] Re: snapshot/resimulate, (continued)