Spice Characterisation

The files for the Spice characterisation of the vsclib, vxlib and sxlib cells in a generic 0.13um technology are in

magic\spice_vsclib013 
magic\spice_vxlib013  
magic\spice_sxlib013  

They have been put here because Magic has been used to extract the layout to a Spice subckt.

The characterisation is done in two steps. The first is a Spice run of the CIR files in the directories underneath. The second is an elaboration of the data produced to write the vsclib013.lib, vxlib013.lib and sxlib013.lib files. The Spice simulator used is Winspice, so this part runs fine under Windows. The elaboration uses Unix scripts, so will not run under vanilla Windows.

The easiest way to get the whole thing running is probably cygwin. Once you have downloaded that and installed it, you must create a command file which will run winspice in batch mode.

I have used the following steps (replace C:\home\pharosc_7.3 by your library location).

1. Choose a directory to hold the command file … C:\home\pharosc_7.3\bin for example.
2. Add this command file to the cygwin search path in a cygwin window

   $ PATH=/home/library/bin:$PATH

   This will add C:\home\pharosc_7.3\bin to the path searched for command files.
3. Create a file called wspice3 in C:\home\pharosc_7.3\bin. This folder contains a file called wspice3.bat which can be copied across and edited if necessary.
4. The file contents are:

   cmd /c "start /wait /min /low c:/WinSpice/wspice3.exe -b $1"

   This will run the program wspice3.exe (make sure this points to the location of your winspice program) in batch mode from the Windows command line interpreter. The /min option keeps the winspice program iconised. The /low option keeps it at a low priority so that interactive work can still be done. The /wait option makes sure that the next steps aren't done until the winspice job has finished.