Spice characterisation

 
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The files for the Spice characterisation of the different libraries in a generic 0.13µm technology are in

pharosc-8.5/magic/spice_rgalib013 
pharosc-8.5/magic/spice_ssxlib013 
pharosc-8.5/magic/spice_sxlib013
pharosc-8.5/magic/spice_vgalib013 
pharosc-8.5/magic/spice_vsclib013 
pharosc-8.5/magic/spice_vxlib013

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 sub-directories. The second is an elaboration of the data produced to write the vsclib013.lib and other Synopsys Liberty format .LIB files, the Alliance .VBE files and the web data sheets.

The Spice simulator used is Winspice, so this part runs fine under Windows. The elaboration uses Unix scripts, so a program like cygwin must be installed for these to run.

I have used the following steps for Windows Spice characterisation on a library held on a USB stick. (replace /f/pharosc_8.3 by your library location). These are commands entered into a cygwin window.

1. Make sure that the Windows cmd.exe command is on the search path

   $ PATH=/c/WINDOWS/system32:$PATH

2. Add the pharosc/bin directory to the search path

   $ PATH=/f/pharosc-8.5/bin:$PATH

   ($PATH is the existing search path to which additional directories can be added, each separated by a colon.)
3. Check the location and name of your winspice binary and adjust the wspice3 scipt in pharosc/bin if necessary. The wspice3 script expects the binary to be in

   c/winspice/wspice3.exe

4. The wspice3 script in Windows/cygwin runs the command

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

   This runs 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.
5. The cells for a function can be characterised by entering the function directory and running allfunction. E.g. for the function aoi31:

   $ cd /f/pharosc-8.5/magic/spice_vsclib013/aoi31 $ ./allaoi31

   This is a batch job so only by monitoring the CPU activity can one see that the job is active. I do this by placing a shortcut to taskmgr.exe in my startup folder (graphic on the right).