Re: [ng-spice] Who is Mike Seningen?
Paolo Nenzi wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> first I would like to ask all the italian people in this list to start to
> write in english, as we have became international. In a few days I will
> repost the NG-SPICE document describing the intended architecture in
> english. The new version will be in Postscript to be more portable (the
> old one was in LyX).
That will be very useful... I know a little spanish :-),
I believe Italians close :-)
>
> >
> > I am NOT a programmer. At best I am a Perl hacker.
> > My company has considered using Berkely spice to augment
> > some of our internal tools, but certain key features
> > are lacking.
> >
>
> Please, describe what kind of features do you think that the Berkeley's
> spice lacks of ? We should concentrate on implementing useful features
> before frills.
>
First: please ask me to explain if I am not clear. Sometimes
it is hard for me to understand something, but not be
able to communicate what I am talking about.
Second: My knowledge of Berkely Spice is limited, the judgements on its
capabilities are based on conversations
I have had with my colleagues.
Third: To make sure that everything is clean. Please
let me know when I have said something or aluded to something
which could expose your code to information that could be
detrimental. We use the term "Clean Room". I want to make
sure that my industry experience is used to help the cause
not hurt it by divulging something I know about the commercial
products that could be considered proprietary.
That having been said:
A couple of areas that I am most familiar with are:
Measurement:
All the commercial tools have various means for measuring
data. I've seen some do it post-processing, but most
do it internal to the run, some even use this information
for future iterations.
The second is the output. My understanding is that there
is only a textual output which allows you to graph in
ASCII, or Tabular formats... All comercial tools use
some sort of binary output. Hspice is the defacto std. (the .tr0
format) Smartspice has emulated this as a .raw file.
I do not know if there is a actual standard used.
A third area is in the use of parameters. It is my understanding that a
berkely spice deck requires hard coded
numbers. I assume the commercial releases use a pre-processor
to take in parameterized netlists and internally convert to
a hard coded deck.
A fourth exploits the ability to internally measure and
the use of parameters. Different commercial versions
name it differently, and they appear to handle slightly
differently but in general its called "Optimization".
It uses various Numerical Iterative Analysis methods
to solve for some result by being able to vary certain
given parameters. This could be classified as a frill,
but it is a very powerful frill.
A fifth feature we use a lot (but I do not know if
it is in the Berkely spice) is the Voltage/Current
controlled sources.
The last feature I know about is usually various
proprietary spice model tweaks that are built into
the programs. Obviously this would not be something
you need to support as long as you support Bsim3v3.
Hope this helps!
> > I just don't have the programming skills),
> > but I certainly should be able to help
> > by giving industry supported feedback and suggestions to
> > improve the overall product. I can also alpha test and
> > help with debug work.
> Thnak you, we need support and testing in the same measure as we need good
> programmers.
>
> > I wish you all good luck and let me know how I maybe able
> > to help....
>
> As you told us you worked with commercial versions of spice. Can you give
> us clues non spice internal structures (we are reverse-engineering the
> source by hand to fully understand how it works) ?
>
Not sure what you mean by internal structures....
I'm a user of the tools, I do not know of the internals
of the tools.
cheers,
Mike
--
---
Michael Seningen
EVSX, Inc.
11612 RM 2244 Suite 200
Austin, Texas 78733
512/421-2134 Fax:512/263-0795
email: mikes@evsx.com
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- Re: [ng-spice] Who is Mike Seningen?, (continued)