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From: upton@ole.UUCP (Mike Upton)
Newsgroups: comp.lsi.cad,comp.lsi
Subject: Re: Faster than SPICE
Message-ID: <560@ole.UUCP>
Date: 10 Apr 89 16:44:18 GMT
References: <16857@obiwan.mips.COM>
Reply-To: upton@ole.UUCP (Mike Upton)
Organization: Seattle Silicon Corporation, Bellevue, WA.
Lines: 42


In reply to Mark Johnson's question about SPICE replacements:

I am not familiar with any circuit simulators that can handle
generic circuit transient analysis( OPAMP's, DRAM's, ECL etc)
that are not based on SPICE-type sparse matirx optimization.

There are a number of commercial products that are based on SPICE
that have significantly higher performance that SPICE2G6.

At Seattle Silicon we use HSPICE (from meta-software?).

HSPICE is basically a Berkeley SPICE compatible simulator that has
been re-writen to be faster and more robust.

It has been so long since we have run 2G6 that we dont really have
any valid performance comparison, but on non-trivial problems
HSPICE is approx 3-10 times faster than 2G6.

I think that even more important than the runtime is the fact that
HSPICE is far more reliable and converges much more quickly than 2G6.
We have no qualms about starting a 3-4 day spice run (when CPU cycles permit)
and waiting for it to finish. We could never do that with 2G6.

The improved convergance of HSPICE easily reduces the number of runs required
to obtain an answer. Thus the overall throughput of the system is MUCH higher.

I have a feeling that this is true with all commercialy supported 
versions of SPICE, I was just telling my experience.

We run on apollos, SUN3-280's, and SUN4-260's, all of which 
give good performance.

I would really like to run HSPICE on a MIPS-M2000 (is that what the R3000 
based system is called?)

Obligatory Postscript
I have no ties to meta-soft (other than a user of their software)

-- 
Michael Upton@Seattle Silicon (uucp: ...uw-beaver!tikal!ole!upton)
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