Simulation Standard

In the design of VLSI circuits the situations occur very often when a single schematic device is implemented in the layout by the group of several devices connected in parallel or series. Such groups of devices must be reduced to a single device in the layout and the circuits must be compared in terms of the single devices taking into account their geometrical characteristics. In this article we introduce some methods of calculation and comparison of geometrical parameters of resistors and capacitors connected in parallel or series, when LVS verification is performed.

A novel simulation method of the steady-state of oscillators, based on Harmonic Balance (HB), is presented. A comparison with regular transient simulations demonstrates its advantages on a feedback voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO).

During the elaboration of a Verilog-A model, debugging a module can be very useful for detecting non-physical behavior or fine-tuning the model. The SILVACO Verilog-A debugger has been designed to meet these needs. It is available since version 2.6.0.R of SmartSpice and works along with SILVACO C-Interpreter. It allows iteration-per-iteration Verilog-A modules debugging. The debugger is tracing all the Verilog-A instantiations of the design, either instances of the SmartSpice netlist or in other Verilog-A modules.

If the MOS model file has the parameters: noia, noib, noic, Af, Kf and nlev=0 will SmartSpice ignore the BSIM III noise parameters (noia, noib and noic)

EDIF has been a vital part of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry for many years and Gateway allows users to convert edif200 formatted files of other tools vendors into Gateway’s schematics and symbols.

Design of large scale chips requires precise knowledge of interconnect delays. However, detailed analysis of interconnects may quickly become computationally too expensive due to the distributed nature of the networks, and the large number of internal nodes extracted.

Single-Electron Transistors (SETs) [1][2] are attractive candidates for post-CMOS VLSI ICs. Accurate models are also required in order to efficiently design SET circuits and hybrid circuits

Hipex-NET is SILVACO’s powerfull hierarchical layout netlist extractor. Built-in extracting rules permit to make fast and accurate parameter extraction for basic set of devices as MOS, BJT, diode, capacitor and resistor. But these rules can’t descibe all devices features and parameters that appeare in new submicron or RF layout designs. To resolve this problem the new HIPEX-NET command HIPEX GENERIC_DEVICE has been introduced. This new HIPEX-NET feature gives to user the capability to extract not only additional parameters for standard devices but also custom defined devices with arbitrary set of parameters. This article describes the new HIPEX-NET command.

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In this paper the electrostatic impact of Channel Hot Electron (CHE) injection in discrete-trap memories is quantitatively addressed. The dual bit behavior of the transfer characteristic during forward and reverse read of a written cell is thoroughly analysed with the help of an analytical model. Such model allows, for the first time, to estimate the effective charged portion of the discrete storage layer, L2, and the quantity of electrons, Q, injected in the trapping