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Simulators >> Circuit Simulators >> switching from Cadence Analog Design Environment GUI to command-line
https://designers-guide.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1252478018

Message started by vivkr on Sep 8^th, 2009, 11:33pm

Title: switching from Cadence Analog Design Environment GUI to command-line
Post by vivkr on Sep 8^th, 2009, 11:33pm

It turns out that I may have to switch from using the ADE GUI with Spectre to command-line Spectre. Apparently, it is the only possible way for running corner sims etc.

Is there any reference out there on using command-line Spectre? And what would be the least painful way of importing existing simulation states? I have tons of them and don't want to have to retype and redefine them all. I see that there is a button on the ADE GUI which can be used to write out an ocean script but I don't know what other hassles there might be in the way. I gather that most of the command-line simulation is not based on using ocean syntax.

Thanks for tips.

Vivek

Title: Re: switching from Cadence Analog Design Environment GUI to command-line
Post by Riad KACED on Sep 25^th, 2009, 1:11pm

Hi Vivek,

You better stick at ocean which is meant for this kind of tasks.
Cadence comes with a corner analysis tool but your PDK/Model files have to be geared to feed that tool. In my previous company we used to have a nice-inhouse GUI to deal with the corners.

If you want to stick at the command lines, then spectre -h would give you all the information you might need.

Again, Ocean is the choice I would advise.

Cheers,
Riad.

Title: Re: switching from Cadence Analog Design Environment GUI to command-line
Post by Andrew Beckett on Jan 3^rd, 2010, 7:22am

Also, if you have the chance to use ADE XL in IC613/IC614, the corner analysis is much better. Actually - I realize that I've seen a post from you talking about that...

Regards,

Andrew.

Title: Re: switching from Cadence Analog Design Environment GUI to command-line
Post by rf-design on Jan 15^th, 2010, 4:03pm

Is there someone who use Matlab as frontend for spectre and result backprocessing?

Title: Re: switching from Cadence Analog Design Environment GUI to command-line
Post by Andrew Beckett on Jan 16^th, 2010, 8:20am

For the results post-processing in Matlab, you can take a look at the Spectre Toolbox for Matlab (which is in the MMSIM installation under <instdir>/tools/spectre/matlab - there are a couple of app notes/workshop docs under <instdir>/tools/spectre/examples/SpectreRF_workshop/SpectreRF_AN which explain this (it's probably in the documentation too).

This allows you to read PSF/SST2 simulation results directly in Matlab.

Regards,

Andrew.

Title: Re: switching from Cadence Analog Design Environment GUI to command-line
Post by rf-design on Feb 1^st, 2010, 6:09pm

We found that serious simulation result analysis and backprocessing requires a powerful, userfriendly, function rich and powerful scripting enviroment. That is Matlab period.

We actual run many test bench analysis scripts trough Matlab. But there is no frontend for Matlab which allows to make a complete script simulator control. That mean that all control structures like netlist composition, corner, variation and mismatch parameter control, simulator start and load distribution should be made by Matlab.

I found only a tool here

http://www.sawtootheda.com/simcontrol.html

But they do not show how the sim result are processed.

The ADE XL could import Matlab script results but only as a function result similar to the calculator expression. But we need that Matlab is the control master because depending on the sim results of a previous sim run further changes in the sim parameter setup are made by the Matlab script.

SpectreMDL is restricted to the function evaluation and Ocean is far away from the quite user experience with Matlab.

Seems to me that Mathworks should better made a SimControl like above which work with all sim vendors including opensource spice which could run on clouds or farms.

Title: Re: switching from Cadence Analog Design Environment GUI to command-line
Post by sos on Feb 2^nd, 2010, 8:13am

vivkr wrote on Sep 8^th, 2009, 11:33pm:

This may be helpful:
http://homerreid.ath.cx/misc/ocean/index.shtml

Steve