Séminaire de Andrei Vladimirescu, UC Berkeley, ISEP

SPICE – Past, Present and Future of The Design Tool that Led the Way to One Billion Transistors per Chip

Résumé

This talk offers a historical view of the advancement of algorithmic and modeling techniques applied in the circuit simulator SPICE along the five decades of its existence.

First, the evolution of SPICE is described from the initial research of a graduate-student project whose goal was to produce the best available program to predict the behavior of integrated circuits (ICs), to an industry standard today, more than four decades and one billion transistors per chip later. In its many commercial implementations SPICE is currently used for every single transistor-level circuit design.

Second, the main reasons for the success of SPICE will be discussed highlighting the main solution algorithms and semiconductor device models. There are two major components of the SPICE solution: algorithms and device models, the synergy of the two being key to the accuracy of the simulation.

The last part will be an overview of recent advancements in functionality and performance. New types of analyses, higher-level model description as well as more accurate and new semiconductor device models, solution-algorithm tuning as well as parallelization for multi-core and many-core architectures will be described.

The presentation will conclude stressing the importance of keeping research in universities and research laboratories in the public domain as a way to include visionary research-stage device models, achieve visibility, success and to benefit the advancement of technology and science.

Biography of the presenter

Andrei Vladimirescu is a key contributor to the SPICE program development at the University of California, Berkeley. His main contributions include the SPICE 2G6 release, on which leading commercial versions like HSPICE are based, a parallel SPICE called CLASSIE for Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) architectures and the design of a SPICE HW accelerator. Andrei is the author of the leading text on circuit simulation, The SPICE Book, published by J. Wiley and Sons. As R&D director in the EDA industry he conceived and managed the development of analog/mixed-signal tools at Daisy, Analog Design Tools, Valid and Cadence. He is currently a professor at UC Berkeley and Institut Superieur d’Electronique de Paris (ISEP)