Hello World
Hi Everyone,
I have been looking at what open source IC development software
exists and was quite pleased when I came across the ngspice project. I
do analog IC design at work, and we use hspoce specter, cadence, avanti,
and so on. I'm not sure but the license for these tools is probably
well into the several hundred thousand dollar range. For this price, I
am very dissapointed in the fairly unstable nature and sense of
kludgyness these tools have. However, they are still very powerfull.
As it stands now, the acquisition of tools is a major barrier for
engineering startups. I have some friends who are in small design
startup companies and they brag about the fact that they have a cadence
liscense. This is NOT cheap. Untill this situation changes, only large
companies will be able to do IC design; those that are already large,
and the venture capitol firms that pay for the little ones to buy their
tools. I dream of the day where the huge costs don't really start
untill you send a design out to fab.
I have been thinking about the possibility of a fully open source IC
development suite for a while now. The long-term dream I have is a full
design suite, including things like HDL simulators and synthesizers,
analog and mixed signal simulation and analysis, layout tools, and
layout parasitic extraction tools. Basically the tools necessary to
take a large project from the top level system design phase to tape-out
for fabrication. I realize that this will NOT happen overnight, but I
feel energized by the knowledge that there are people working on a
professional quality simulator.
I apologize for the length of this post, but I would like to explain
where I am coming from. A free (as in speech) simulator that is of the
highest quality is absolutely necessary for this to be usefull on a
large scale. I've done a little bit of reasearch into specter (of
course, they don't let you see the code) and would like to make ngspice
able to have the same or better performance. An other thing I think
would be good is the ability for this to run on, and take advantage of,
MP alphas. This may become moot by the time this happens, but alphas
have been about twice as fast as the competition in fp calculations for
a few years now.
Well, I just downloaded the code and will start looking at it to see
what sense of it I can make. I'm familiar with C, but am not really a
programmer. I am coming at this from the viewpoint of an analog
designer and want to help make this a professional quality simulator.
Matt
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