Hi folks,

Any one used Berkeley Design Automation's analog or RF fastSpice simulators and would like to comment on the performance/issues they have faced when using the tools ?

http://berkeley-da.com/

cheers
aw

Does any one know if it supports VerilogA or VerilogAMS or any other behavioral modeling language?
And if so, is it full support or just enough to support device models?

So far I am impressed with the speed of BDA's spice solver for transient simulations, and satisfied with the accuracy... and there haven't been any real issues, which given the variety of netlists and veriloga behaviourial code we have thrown at it, is comforting.

So my next question is: would anyone like to comment on their experience with the BDA's RF tool offering, especially in reference to accuracy and comparison to spectreRF ?

I guess that optimization based on today's computer architecture has been made. Traditional SPICE is over 30 years old, and the computer architecture has been changing a lot since then.

http://www.berkeley-da.com/news/news_pr/news01_pr_2007_11_06.html

I expect a starter of this topics knows this tool very well.

Hi Folks,

are there any experience regarding mixed-mode simulation. We have started to use AMS-Designer with ultrasim solver. We observed a nice speedup compared to the spectre solver. Pure ultrasim simulations of the full chip are still to lengthy,

Regards, Achim

I have seen many public simulation benchmark results that are almost meaningless. The benchmark results only give the size of the circuits, e.g. # of MOSFETS and RC's, and simulation time. Why this is meaningless? It is because for the same circuit, one can simualte 1ns or 1ms transient time. The simulation time will differ by orders of magnitude. Then there is also the computer difference. However, now this difference is probably not that large.

I would like to give some GSIM benchmark data that is much more meagingful. Hope that others will release their benchmark result the same way in the future. Then users will know exactly how fast the simulator, rather than reading meaningless marketing stuff.

Circuit Size:  17477 bsim3v3's,  53632 capacitors, 600 resistors, ...
Circuit Type: Sigma Delta ADC
Matrix Size: 37336
Transient Simulation Stop Time: 63us
Total # of Simulation Time Steps:  1037144

Simulation Elapse Time (Wallclock Time) :   28 hours

byang
http://www.gemini-da.com

Hi, pancho_hideboo,

I agree with you actually. I think I didn't make myself clear enough in my previous post. I wanted to say that whether it is Intel CPU or AMD CPU doesn't make a big difference.

If the simulator is different, then there is a big difference certainly.

In fact, I believe very few Spice simulator can get close to the benchmark result in gave in my previous post. Many Spice simulators should be 10x or more slower than that benchmark. The purpose of my posting the benchmark data is to give readers a concrete reference data for measuring whether a simulator is fast or slow.

byang
http://www.gemini-da.com