Xyce - the most important open source EDA release?

[Kevin Cameron]

https://xyce.sandia.gov/

Xyce was recently released by Sandia Labs under a GPL license - unlike Spice 3 which is a BSD license. It is an actively funded project with the goal of building an HPC Spice-like simulator (parallel processing for speed and capacity).

A friend of mine is working on making it HSpice compatible.

In theory a fully working Xyce (HSpice compatible) could become the reference simulator for the EDA industry and displace commercial tools. One reason for that is that the higher variability in deep submicron Silicon means people run a lot of "Monte Carlo" simulations - and that's expensive with licensed/commercial software. Another reason that a good reference simulator is something that everybody can use, and commercial licensing locks some people out.

I'm not a Spice developer myself, but I hope to use Xyce as a base for mixed-signal simulation targeting digital/SoC.

Kev.

[Erik Jessen]

Is it intended for full-up digital simulation (e.g. UVM, VHDL/Verilog sim of big chips), or just enough digital to model the "lumpy analog"?

There's a big difference in what's needed between simulating a FSM or two in a mixed-signal environment, and a 1M gate digital design.

I did 10 years of SPICE, and 15 years of big-digital - it's hard to make a tool that's useful in both.

Thanks,

Erik

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[Sherif Eid]

According to its history it's made for extreme capacity (reports of 30million elements simulated in a single run), with a numerical engine that's completely different from spice (made to run a single large simulation on multi CPUs and even multiple hosts on the network) with a ability to create and use specialized models (photon and radiation effects for space)