It's been several years since I've run SPICE myself, but I'm finding it increasingly needed even for a RTL/gate-level engineer. Could anyone recommend some really good SPICE books, which aren't just a reference but show you how to do things? You can post your recommendations and advice here as comments. The "things" I'd be most interested in doing would be characterizing digital standard cells and analyzing IC interconnect.
I looked at Amazon.com and didn't find a lot of books like this (no "SPICE for Dummies"?), but these two look interesting. Before I or my company spends a chunk of change, do you know these titles and how useful they are?
2 comments:
Hi John,
My experience with books has been very poor in this domain (standard cell characterization, characterizing IC interconnect).
SPICE vendors Synopsys/Cadence/Magma/Mentor (HSPICE, FineSim. Eldo) have good reference manuals on how to run SPICE and have support for these tools when you hit upon convergence issues. I have found these manuals to be okay to get the job done.
My company uses silicon smart for std cell characterization (which invokes a spice simulator engine internally) and we always fall back to the vendor Manuals.
Hey, come checkout my blog at
www.cad-for-vlsi.blogspot.com.
This Blog deals with various aspects of VLSI CAD.
However if you are new to spice, these books (Vladimirescu) have good basics and are popular texts used by senior students for analog courses across universities in the Unites States.
Thanks Nikhil! I will read the HSPICE manuals first. Can't beat the price if you have HSPICE already. :-)
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