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https://designers-guide.org/forum/YaBB.pl Simulators >> Circuit Simulators >> Any result browser can read spectre output? https://designers-guide.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1224475924 Message started by john_ana on Oct 19th, 2008, 9:12pm |
Title: Any result browser can read spectre output? Post by john_ana on Oct 19th, 2008, 9:12pm Greetings! I am tired of debugging the bugs in cadence's wavescan. In my opinion, spectre is a very good simulator but the back-end processing stuff such as wavescan is kind of shaky and is not stable. Sometime it works, sometime it doesn't. I am looking for a robust result browser like awaves. I know sandwork's SPICE explorer can read the spectre's output and is very stable. However, its license is kind of expensive. Any other tools can read spectre's output directory? I am wandering if there is a tool that can convert spectre netlist to spice netlist. Usually foundry will provide models for spectre and spice. If I can get netlist in spicem, I can run Hspice and use awaves to plot the results. Thanks |
Title: Re: Any result browser can read spectre output? Post by Geoffrey_Coram on Oct 20th, 2008, 6:19am Sandwork was bought by Synopsys last year, I think; since you have other Synopsys tools, you might be able to get a decent price in a VPA for WaveView Analyzer (Spice explorer is something else). You should also investigate the other output formats of Spectre -- maybe you can find one that your favorite viewer can read. (awaves is 2 generations old now; CosmoScope and now WaveView are the "newer" viewers) |
Title: Re: Any result browser can read spectre output? Post by Ken Kundert on Oct 20th, 2008, 12:47pm I believe that most people, when confronted with this problem, revert back to AWD. -Ken |
Title: Re: Any result browser can read spectre output? Post by john_ana on Oct 20th, 2008, 6:52pm Ken and Geoffrey, Thanks a lot for the reply. I am doing a TIA transient simulation and I ran spectre in standalone mode (no GUI) After the simulation is done, I use result browser or calculator to plot the output waveform and do a FFT on the curve. It is very weird that I can use calculator to plot the waveform, but when I tried to use the dft function, it says something like: ("strcat" 43 t nil ("Error" strcat argument #1 should either be a string or symbol ((type template = \"S\" nil)) The expression it calls error on is something like: dft(v("/SO", ?resultDir "./simulation/test/spectre/schematic/psf" ?result "tran-tran") 20u 1m 65536 "Rectangular" 1 dftCoherentGain ("Rectangular",1)) I did some research on the output format, it seems I can use options -rawfmt=nutbin,sst2,psfbin,wsfbin etc. However to read nutbin results, do i need to have nutmeg installed? any popular result viewer can handle this such as nWave? smartspice? I also tried to use simulator lang = spice .fft V(SO) 20u 1m 65536 However it will report that the .fft card is not currently supported. My question is how do I plot the fft without resorting to dump the waveform into a text file? how to invoke AWD? |
Title: Re: Any result browser can read spectre output? Post by Geoffrey_Coram on Oct 21st, 2008, 5:27am nutmeg is the output format for Spice3 -- and there are other simulators (eg ADS and Spectre) that can be told to produce it; I've found some differences in their actual file format -- and, of course, some analysis types like PSS or HB that weren't in Spice3 may not have a nutmeg representation. I would think, though, that your transient analysis would work fine. I found tools.lnx86/dfII/bin/awd in my Cadence install. |
Title: Re: Any result browser can read spectre output? Post by Frank Wiedmann on Oct 21st, 2008, 6:11am There have been a number of problems with the new sst2 format, so switching to psfbin might help you, see http://sourcelink.cadence.com/docs/db/kdb/2008/Feb/11422868.html. |
Title: Re: Any result browser can read spectre output? Post by jbdavid on Dec 18th, 2008, 8:29pm There is also a matlab code for reading psf data.. |
Title: Re: Any result browser can read spectre output? Post by rf-design on Mar 4th, 2009, 3:13am Is that the cds2raw.m Matlab script which read psf data into matlab workspace? I found it under the /spectre/matlab in the MMSIM dir. Does it work with the default setting from a VADE? Are there further docs beside the matlabmeasug.pdf *.pdf in the IC dir. It is not updated since 2004? |
Title: Re: Any result browser can read spectre output? Post by Andrew Beckett on Mar 4th, 2009, 5:54am Look in <MMSIMinstDir>/tools/spectre/examples/SpectreRF_workshop/SpectreRF_AN and you'll see MatlabWorkshop.pdf and MatlabAN.pdf which explain how to use it. Broadly speaking though, you'll need this: Code:
before launching matlab. The above settings are for if you're running 64 bit matlab; if 32 bit you'd omit the "/64bit" part from the MATLABPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH This ensures that the MATLABPATH is set up OK, and the LD_LIBRARY_PATH contains the right paths such that the toolbox can load its shared libraries. The "cds_srr" command (part of the "Spectre Toolbox") can be used to read all sorts of data from PSF - essentially you call it with: cds_srr('/path/to/psf/dir'[,'datasetname'[,'signalName']) and it returns: 1. With 1 arg - the datasets available (same as what you see in results browser) 2. With 2 args - the signals in that dataset 3. With 3 args - the data for that signal. This may be a record with (say) .V and .time elements, or it may be a matrix if there was some sweeps The toolbox comes with a bunch of other higher level functions for plotting RF results - these are covered in the app note and workshop PDFs that I mention above. You don't have to run spectre in any special way to be able to read the results - this reader can read PSF or SST2 simulation results. Regards, Andrew. |
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