Things about SmartSpice, Hspice...

smartspice hspice spectre

Hi,

Can any one give me a comparison between Hspice, SmartSpice and Tanner T-spice? How do they compare with respect to accuracy, speed, convergency, ease of use, etc?
Thanks

smartspice hspice

hspice and smartspice are good and very popular in industry, especially the hspice. t-spice may be more suitable for education.

what is smart spice and hspice

Silvaco have claimed that their Smartspice has performance as high as Hspice which is the leading SPICE simulator now. Tanner T-Spice even though probably lack in performance it come along with S-Edit (schematic editor), W-Edit (waveform viewer) and L-Edit (layout editor) becoming IC design suite fitting in a small budget.

waveviewer hspice

Thanks guys, but can you be more concrete? I can imagine that Hspice is probably a good simulator if it is an industry standard. But I need to get understanding about accuracy, speed and convergency of these three. I don't know what can be taken as a reference - perhaps Eldo which I used and is a prety good simulator, but doesn't have a very good waveform viewer.

smart spice vs hspice

Hspice: support more model than any spice tool, accuracy, no GUI, boring and user unfriendly, and expensive... 25K
Smart Spice: A lot of feature, Good GUI, a good competition, cheap <5K
T- spice. Good interface with layout tool L_edit, S_edit. Cheap too.

Depend on what you need , Hspice is to much overkill. IC design houses are dealling with a million dollar design , so Hspice is a warrantee. It may be a myth, but people can't take a risk, politics you know

i think hspice is graet
i am using it in simulation in my graduation project , it is really good and i have tried T-spice from tanner it very easy to use

sutapanaki said:

Thanks guys, but can you be more concrete? I can imagine that Hspice is probably a good simulator if it is an industry standard. But I need to get understanding about accuracy, speed and convergency of these three. I don't know what can be taken as a reference - perhaps Eldo which I used and is a prety good simulator, but doesn't have a very good waveform viewer.

Click to expand...

It probebly hard to specify how exactly accuracy the simulators are if you didn't have familiarized with real circuit implementation. In this case, I mean IC fabrication since it reduce all unwanted parameter e.g. human error, pcb's parasitics, etc. I, myself, didn't intimate with real IC making either.

Anyway, as my experience, Hspice has an excellent in both accuracy, speed and convergence esp. in workstation platform (Unix), however, depend on how you config their options too. Some circuits that PSpice or T-Spice can't finish but Hspice can. Another one which have well-known in accuracy and convergence is Spectre from Cadence. Hspice has the most terrible user interface for all new users. Its text-mode input causes a big barrier in begining but you will love it at the end. The waveform viewer of Hspice itself (Avanwaves) is not so good but the additional "Cosmos-Scope" is very excellent even better than Cadence (in my opinion).

I have never intentionally used SmartSpice even I have it in hand because my favorite Hspice can alway suite me in every case. I think if you didn't work on the really critical jobs, any simulator is OK. But if that time has come, I'll choose Hspice.

HSpice is my favourite IC simulation tool. I have not try smartspice, but Spectre is another good choice however it is very expensive.

Although I have HSPICE as the first choice, I have to say that Smartspice has few interesting features that are unique.

It's capability of adding both, but distinct, tolerances and distributions for each model parameter allows you to perform statistical simulation including local mismatch !!!

No other simulator, to my knowledge has this capability. For the rest it is comparable to other tools, except there is no licgen around .

nathan

For IC design, I will chose HSPICE instead of others.

Hi

A. Avant! settles with Silvaco for $20.5M

1. h**p://www.silvaco.com/cgi-bin/news/showItem/2002_06_06_01.html

B.1 SmartSpice is compatible with HSpice™, PSpice™ and Berkeley Spice. Designs completed under HSpice™ and PSpice™ can be re-simulated without modification. SmartSpice vendor compatibility uniquely preserves past investments and creates new freedoms with enhanced models, features, analysis capabilities and superior customer support.

B.2 Silvaco is committed to support Berkeley BSIM3v3/BSIM4 and Silvaco's advanced implementation of these models.

Silvaco's BSIM3v3/BSIM4 solve a number of problems present in the Berkeley models and offer unique enhancements to both the physical model as well as the numerical implementation of these models.

After years of intensive development including extensive comparison with results from our S-Pisces device simulator, Silvaco today offers the highest quality and the best calibrated physical MOSFET model available!

2. h**p://www.silvaco.com/products/analog/crusade/smartspice/smartspice_br.html

C. Parallel SmartSpice for PC

3. h**p://www.silvaco.com/applications/archive/oct97_a2/oct97_a2.html


* -> t

tnx

spectre

Hi,
i have to use s/pe/ctr/e in the near future. does anybody know, wether there is a GUI for it?

Thanks...

Re: spectre

hqqh said:

Hi,
i have to use s/pe/ctr/e in the near future. does anybody know, wether there is a GUI for it?

Click to expand...

Sure!! if you use it in Cadence ICxxx suite, it will come up with a very user friendly GUI.

Hspice

If you do not want to waste time do the comparison of these
SPICES, just use Hspice. That's the industry standard

Simulators Comparison

My personal experience and preferences about the mentioned simulators follow:

- Eldo - Great simulator (my favorite). Didn't give me any "convergence problem", yet. Awful wave viewer - "Xelga" - shame. Supports Philips models, though.

- HSpice - Very good simulator. A bit slower than expected, but with fast CPU it shouldn't be a problem. A bit better wave viewer - AvantWave. It's hard to get support from Avant! if you aren't a "big fish". I had some problems (solvable) with the "convergence". Also supports Philips models.

- PSpice (OrCAD) - Good simulator. Haven't used it recently, so it could have improved. It has my favorite wave viewer, though - "Probe". Very nice integrated environment (good for beginners). Give some "convergence problems" when relatively big circuits with digital logic and lots of feedbacks are used.

- SmartSpice - Well, really faster than the others, but I still have some doubts about the accuracy. And a funny name - like all the other simulators are "dump".

- T-Spice - I just started using it, but so far - no problems.

As you can see I didn't discuss the friendliness of each product. I assume that it shouldn't be an issue, as long you have a decent Schematic Capture and you know the Spice syntax well. My favorite Schematic Capture is ViewDraw, though. Then comes PSpice Schematics.

I didn't discuss the Cadence's products, as well. I consider them way too expensive, unfriendly, clumsy and not worthy for this forum.

I didn't compare the speed, as well. It depends so much on the platform (Sun, PC), the OS (Solaris, Linux, WinXX), the CPU, memory, etc. The best scenario will be to run all of them at the same machine, which I did not do it.

Good Luck.

Hi

How about dolphin smash simulator ?? it already hspice L49 model

another is MyCad myspice (my_analog station )

how about the two spice performance ??

how to compare

We usually compare spice tool by the same case ,
like a amplifier , PLL circuit
and we can measure 2 spice tool in AC simulation or .tran simulation

and we also use specifal case ( Inside spice book said)
some EDA tool will get "wrong simulation result by algorithm)
and only some circuit can tell you what is "good simulator"

I think "inside spice " is very good book for you

I have HSPICE as the first choice

Is there any tool that can measure PLL's jitter in a decent/neat manner?