RE: [ng-spice-devel] Re: snapshot/resimulate


To "'ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it'" <ng-spice-devel@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
From "Gillespie, Alan" <Alan.Gillespie@analog.com>
Date Fri, 13 Apr 2001 10:32:10 +0100
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Jon,

Sorry, but you guys know I can never resist these kind of
things .....

>       lastly, suggesting incorporation of any microsoft code
>       in an open-source endeavor is quite ironic...

I think that the above comment, and the fact that ng-spice won't
even compile in a non-gnu (never mind non-unix) environment,
gives you an idea of how "open" the open source development
environment seems to be. (I'm not just getting at ng-spice here).

>       as a chip designer, i would say that 90-100% of chip design
>       is unix hosted, not windows hosted.

Sadly, he's right. As a >15 year circuit designer myself, I've
used quite a variety of tools, and I was at my happiest (with
the tools) about 10 years ago when I was working in a DOS
environment. It's the only time in my career when a CAD manager
came in and asked all the engineers what they weren't happy with,
and nobody had any gripes ! I know many of you will find that
hard to believe ;-)

>     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).

Why ? Apart from the fact that a lot of cadtool manufacturers
don't support Windows ('cos then they'd have to sell at Windows
prices).

>       (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).

Again, that's the standard case. But in my experience, many
engineers would prefer to sit at a Windows machine with some X
software. Then you can get tools like spreadsheets, word-
processors, Mathcad, and use X to get the CAD tools. At the
last place I worked, only one of the designers wanted to sit
at a workstation, the rest of us wanted PCs. Where I am now,
we all have SunPCI cards, which, although slow and buggy,
give us access to all the software we need.

I get a similar performance running my version of spice at
home on my $1000 PC as I do at work on my $10000 workstation.
I haven't found a better post-processor (yet) than PSPICE's
PROBE program, which runs perfectly happily on a PC, but costs
much more for a workstation (last time I inquired).

Anyway, rant off. It seems to me that we're unlikely to be
incorporating any Windows technology in ng-spice. I'd still
like to get it to at least compile under Windows, but since
it's all based on autoconf, that's not easy.

Cheers,

Alan

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