SMIC ?? Hm, I have not designed on their processes before so I have not been into their model sets.
Take a look at my chip design article -
http://www.chipdesignmag.com/display.php?articleId=438&issueId=16thats my "poke around and look inside" method of determining if models are any good.
The quick questions:
- are all passive models three wire with parasitics?
- do all passives have thermal variance in them?
- are the MOS models BSIM 3v2 or later?
- is flicker noise present in the CMOS models?
If the answer is yes to all of the above, then you can usually say that some care was taken in developing the models.
Also remember the models can be BSIM2500.99 :D
but that does not mean that the numbers put into the model are correct.
I did a foundry model audit for 65nm recently, the models were BSIM4.5, but a large portion of the parameters were either zero, or not set and went to default values. Essentially it was a Level 13 (the old BSIM 1) model due to the fact that none of the numbers were set properly.
The most common problem with the transistor models are:
noise not properly set,
capacitance distributed improperly,
derivative terms (transconductance et. al.) not fitting properly.
If you can post a transistor model, a resistor model and a cap model I can take a quick look.Jerry