( SNUG 99 Item 38 ) ----------------------------------------------- [3/31/99]
"This user paper was given by an employee of Motorola (Austin) and
described this user's experience using the Synopsys EPIC PowerMill,
with the ACE option, to simulate a PLL. This user paper won 2nd place
overall and was an excellent presentation of this user's "real world"
experiences using a new tool on a project with an extremely tight
schedule (he said he had 8 months to tapeout his PLL design). The
author presented what features of the tool he found useful, how the
tool compared in accuracy to MSSPICE (Motorola's version of Spice) - he
said the tools were within 5% of each other, and many lessons learned
using the tool. Knowing nothing about this tool, but knowing the
gotcha's of using any new tool, I found his presentation extremely
insightful as he clearly described to the audience the dangers of using
certain modes and switches of the ACE tool, and the consequences of
using these modes/switches. He described that the ACE tool was faster
than Spice by several orders of magnitude, but to achieve this
performance, the tool "ignores" certain capacitors and resistors whose
values are below some preset number. He told the users how to modify
these preset values so that they can properly simulate circuits which
may have elements that would otherwise be automatically deleted by the
tool. This was just one example of many useful tips the author
presented. The bottom line is that the author said that after he
learned how to use this tool, it allowed him to "almost" meet his
original schedule, a schedule he said he would have had NO chance of
meeting if he had to use Spice.
Although I don't plan on using ACE anytime in the near future, I
appreciated the usefulness of this paper to anyone who may be planning
on using the tool."
- Ken Banas of Basis Communications Corp.
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