SPECTRE Replacement in the Cadence Flow
Spectre is the Cadence SPICE simulator that can be used in the OASIS design
environment. The Cadence environment has been available on Solaris for a number
of years. Currently under shifting market pressures to standardize engineering
desktop computer on the Linux OS, Cadence has introduced their design environment
on Linux. Silvaco has always supported the Solaris based Cadence design environment
for seemless SmartSpice integration. To accommodate
new customer demands to support the new Linux environment, Silvaco has developed
a SmartSpice interface for it. This new interface
software allows users to replace SPECTRE with SmartSpice
as the analog simulation engine without disrupting the design flow. This benefits
analog circuit designers as they can access the latest high quality SPICE models
(such as BSIM4.40 CMOS model, TFT, SOI, etc.) without changing the setup. From
the user’s point of view nothing has changed. The user see’s the
same Cadence schematic and the same viewer, and is oblivious to which SPICE
engine (SPECTRE or SmartSpice) is used. The power
of this interface is that it can provide both Analog and mixed Analog/Digital
simulation under the Solaris operating system at present. The mixed signal capability
will be available shortly for Linux. New functionality has been included to
dynamically change the menus so multi-level Monte-Carlo simulation will be possible
as well as use of the optimizer functions inside SmartSpice.
Figure 1. Linux terminal view of Cadence interface.