Hspice

[slecky]

Hello,
I just graduated with a B.Sc. in electrical engineering, and wish to do
SoC, mixed-signal circuit design.
I have never used Hspice, just a little Spice for tweaking my simulation in
a GUI circuit simulator. Should I learn HSpice as thoroughly as I used VHDL
for digital designs (I used VHDL much more extensively -- hundreds of lines
of code). Or will just a basic understanding of HSpice suffice to get me a
job?
How much is it used?

thanks

 

[Kevin Aylward]

slecky wrote:

Hello,
I just graduated with a B.Sc. in electrical engineering, and wish
to do SoC, mixed-signal circuit design.
I have never used Hspice, just a little Spice for tweaking my
simulation in a GUI circuit simulator. Should I learn HSpice as
thoroughly as I used VHDL for digital designs (I used VHDL much more
extensively -- hundreds of lines of code). Or will just a basic
understanding of HSpice suffice to get me a job?
How much is it used?

Despite there sometimes being requests by dumb as shit HR managers, it
makes, essentially, no real difference what spice you as far getting to
grips with simulation. The learning curve to transfer to another spice
is trivial, they ar all GUI driven. Running spice nowadays is,
essentially, equivalent to learning Word and Excel. i.e. us engineers
all laugh when we see a job spec that requires such mundane knowledge.

VHDL and spice cannot be compared in the way you suggest. Drawing a
circuit and setting a few spice parameters, e.g. ac sweep ranges,
transient time ranges etc is, essentially, all you need to know to run
spice for basic tasks forming the majority of the work. "Thoroughly"
learning a spice is about an hours work max.

What is far, far more important is understanding design itself. Learn
*design* as thoroughly as you can. Try and understand all the reasons
why a circuit has been designed the way it has.

However, there is one aspect of Spices, especially the inexpensive ones,
that should be considered. Not all of them have all the hooks for doing
i.c design transparently via their GUI's. Typically, this is HSpices
extensions hdif to automatically calculate parasitics, and mosfet
binning support. Ther is of couse one very inexpensive Spice that do
have these features

Kevin Aylward
salesEXTRACT@anasoft.co.uk
http://www.anasoft.co.uk
SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode
Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture,
Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

 

[Chaos Master]

There should be a part of slecky brain within this message' contents:

Hello,
I just graduated with a B.Sc. in electrical engineering, and wish to do
SoC, mixed-signal circuit design.
I have never used Hspice, just a little Spice for tweaking my simulation in
a GUI circuit simulator. Should I learn HSpice as thoroughly as I used VHDL
for digital designs (I used VHDL much more extensively -- hundreds of lines
of code). Or will just a basic understanding of HSpice suffice to get me a
job?
How much is it used?

Most simulators are graphical. You set the parameters in dialog boxes, menus and
such, without need for coding in Spice language.

But knowing it won't be bad and it's not hard to learn.

[]s
--
Š 2004 Chaos Master | "I'm going under,
Posting from Brazil! | drowning in you
Linux User #349031 : | I'm falling forever,
Slackware / Knoppix | I've got to break through"
---------------------. -- Evanescence, "Going Under"