Andrew Beckett
Senior Fellow
Offline
Life, don't talk to me about Life...
Posts: 1742
Bracknell, UK
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Elaborating on Ken's answer a bit (I'm sure this has come up before)...
There is one simulator, called spectre. spectreRF is an option to spectre which allows access to additional analyses (pss, pac, pxf, pnoise, psp, qpss, qpac, qpxf, qpnoise, qpsp, envlp) .
In the Analog Design Environment, there are two interfaces to the simulator. spectreS and spectre. In both cases you can access spectre and spectreRF features, but spectreS is limited because it is obsolete.
spectreS is the older interface which operates via the "cdsSpice Socket" - the "S in spectreS stands for "Socket". This was needed in the past as the standard way of integrating simulators in ADE because commonly simulators did not have a strong parameterisation and expression handling capability. cdsSpice however had a fairly powerful preprocessing language which could act as the preprocessor for other simulators.
However, spectre has had a good expression language for some time now, and so it made sense to cut out the middle man and interface directly to the simulator. So the spectre interface was created which directly talks to spectre, and is much faster as a result. Since spectre interface was introduced in IC443, spectreS has not been enhanced - so many of the newer spectre and spectreRF analyses are not there in spectreS.
The only reason you would use spectreS is if you're using an old design flow which only supports spectreS (the CDF information in primitive libraries needs to support the interface). Otherwise you should steer well clear of it and use the spectre (direct) interface. We keep the old interface because customers who cannot move, or who have very slow CAD departments (joke ;) ) would complain like mad if we removed it!
Regards,
Andrew.
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