( ESNUG 446 Item 9 ) -------------------------------------------- [09/01/05]
Subject: ( ESNUG 443 #9 ) Another Review of Sandwork vs. Mentor & Cadence
> I did some testing with a now rather old version of Sandwork's SPICE
> Explorer -- I think it was the 2004.1 version. I generated a couple of
> 2 G bytes files in Scope format: one was a Montecarlo simulation of some
> 800 runs with about 30 signals in it, the other was a single transient
> run with just 2 voltage signals. I had no problems in opening them and
> on my machine (Intel P4 2.40 GHz, SuSE 9.0). It took about two minutes
> to load the whole file in RAM.
From: [ The Mouse That Roared ]
John,
You asked me about Sandwork tools. Please keep me anon.
Sandwork's SPICE Explorer is a fast, mostly analog, waveform viewer.
What really strikes me is that all the basic things work fast. OK, its
calculator and the session management are really good, too. We just reload
a session and all our calculations are re-done.
The setup and install is very straightforward. It fits well in our design
environment, because WaveView reads our default waveform format.
SPICE Explorer's biggest strength is its speed. Its biggest weakness is
that it does not support our in-house netlist format, so we cannot use the
netlist browser features.
Suppose our simulation/design is a small block and we're doing simulation
over temp, Vdd, corners, R, C & L variation, design parameters. Then we
have easily a few hundred runs in one file. We do not use ADE, so forget
about AWD. Xelga + Sandwork perform well on this data (load, draw, redraw,
zoom all less 1 sec). Mentor Ezwave load takes 10 minutes!
Suppose we have a gigabyte waveform file with only a few waveforms in it.
Every waveform is really really big. Here Sandwork (where redraw, zoom
is a matter of a few seconds) by far outperforms Xelga (where redraw, zoom
usually take many minutes!)
When it comes to support/bug fixes, Sandwork outperforms Mentor and Cadence.
You can talk to Cadence about AMS-Designer or UltraSim, however they are not
really interested in a waveform viewer. Mentor just resells Xelga, there is
no further development. They have launched a new waveform viewer called
EZwave, but for a long time, it even could not read the Mentor COU format.
Now it does, but EZwave is so slow.
On the other hand, Sandwork is interested in their Waveform Viewer. This
means that things get done and bugs get fixed. For them it's not just a
by-product of some bigger tool.
The bottom line is that Sandworks is a very good waveform viewer, and I
definitely recommend it.
- [ The Mouse That Roared ]
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