SPICE Simulation

What Is SPICE Simulation?

Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE) is an essential software tool for electronics design that enables engineers to model and analyze the behavior of electronic circuits before they are physically constructed. It allows designers to input schematic representations of circuits, including resistors, capacitors, transistors, and other components, and simulate circuit performance by computing various parameters of interest, such as current, voltage, and power, across these components under different conditions. Thus, SPICE simulation helps predict the circuit’s behavior in the real world. Born in the labs of the University of California, Berkeley in the 1970s, SPICE has become a superhero for electronics engineers worldwide, providing a crystal ball to predict how the circuit behaves under different conditions before any physical intervention

SPICE simulation has been an industry staple for decades to analyze circuits without literally making them. With increasing complexity and reduced time to market, SPICE simulators offer many benefits for design engineers, such as:

  • Cost-benefit: SPICE simulations help to reduce design costs. As we know, circuit design is an iterative process, and using simulations design helps design engineers reduce these simulations, thereby, reducing design cost.
  • Time to market: With increased functionality over SoCs, design engineers are finding it challenging to complete designs in time. However, meeting the time constraint is essential. SPICE simulation enables design engineers to meet time constraints.
  • Using SPICE simulations, it’s easy to incorporate the changes in the design and perform analysis.
  • Improves productivity.

How Does SPICE Simulation Work?

The SPICE simulator is a powerful tool for analyzing circuits and determining the output response when an input is applied. It leverages text-based component models to perform the analysis, which are comprehensible to SPICE programs. Today, many vendors have created their own versions of SPICE simulators by adding their list of component models to the code. These simulators support a wide range of circuit elements, from simple ones such as resistors, capacitors, and inductors to complex non-linear devices such as MOSFETs and bipolar transistors. SPICE analysis includes AC (frequency domain), DC (steady state), transient (time domain), and RF analyses, and others such as noise, transfer function, and stability. The computational methods used by SPICE simulation include linearization, integration, and Newton's method (Newton-Raphson) to solve equations.

SPICE Simulation with Cadence

Cadence understands that SPICE simulation is crucial to the overall EDA workflow. It is impossible to build modern circuits without extensive use of simulation and verification technologies.

PSpice — PSpice is the gold standard for design analysis. With defining features such as component tolerance analysis, manufacturability, sensitivity, and even advanced systems simulation links with MATLAB, PSpice can provide precisely what you need to determine where your design should go next. Furthermore, with a 35,000-model library growing by the month, you can stop wasting time building out known components and get right into the applications and dynamics that make engineering interesting.

Cadence Spectre Simulation platform offers a seamless accuracy-performance continuum from block-level simulation through chip-level verification. As the industry’s leading solution for accurate analog simulation, the Cadence Spectre Simulation Platform provides a comprehensive portfolio of custom simulation solutions for analog and mixed-signal design and verification teams. The infrastructure foundation of the platform is a unified set of technologies shared by all SPICE engines—the parser, device models, Verilog-A behavioral modeling, input data formats, output data formats, etc.—thereby guaranteeing consistent and accurate evaluation methods regardless of the simulator selected.

Cadence FastSPICE circuit simulator is set to revolutionize memory and large-scale System-on-Chip (SoC) design verification, offering unparalleled efficiency and precision. With its cutting-edge, scalable architecture, Spectre FX promises to deliver up to three times the performance of competing FastSPICE simulators, without sacrificing accuracy. This enhancement strengthens the Spectre simulation platform's comprehensive leadership in the industry, providing a full suite of verification tools for analog, RF, mixed-signal, memory, and SoC designs.

Cadence Virtuoso ADE Suite — Cadence Virtuoso ADE suite provides design analysis and verification tools for running 10 to 10,000 simulations. It provides increased simulation throughput to help you complete the verification process faster.

Learn how Cadence can help you with your SPICE simulation needs today.