Spectre is a

SPICE A spice is a seed, fruit, root, bark, or other plant substance primarily used for flavoring or coloring food. Spices are distinguished from herbs, which are the leaves, flowers, or stems of plants used for flavoring or as a garnish. Spices a ...

-class circuit simulator owned and distributed by the software company

Cadence Design Systems Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (stylized as cādence), headquartered in San Jose, California, is an American multinational computational software company, founded in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc. The company produces software, ...

. It provides the basic SPICE analyses and component models. It also supports the Verilog-A modeling language. Spectre comes in enhanced versions that also support RF simulation (

SpectreRF SpectreRF is an option to the Spectre Circuit Simulator from Cadence Design Systems. It adds a series of analyses that are particularly useful for RF circuits to the basic capabilities of Spectre. SpectreRF was first released in 1996 and was nota ...

) and mixed-signal simulation (AMS Designer).

Specifications

List of supported device models

* Advanced-node models, including the latest versions of the BSIM CMG, BSIM IMG, and UTSOI models * MOSFET models, including the latest versions of the BSIM3, BSIM4, BSIM Bulk (BSIM6), PSP, and HiSIM * High-voltage MOS models, including the latest versions of the HiSIM HV, MOS9, MOS11, and EKV * Silicon on insulator (SOI), including latest versions of BTASOI, SSIMSOI, BSIMSOI, BSIMSOI PD, and HiSIM SOI *

Bipolar junction transistor A bipolar junction transistor (BJT) is a type of transistor that uses both electrons and electron holes as charge carriers. In contrast, a unipolar transistor, such as a field-effect transistor, uses only one kind of charge carrier. A bipola ...

(BJT) models, including the latest versions of VBIC, HICUM, Mextram, HBT, and Gummel-Poon models * Diode models, including the diode, Phillips level 500, and CMC diode models * JFET models, including the JFET, Phillips level 100 JFET, and Individual dual-gate JFET models * IGBT models, including PSpice® IGBT model and HiSIM IGBT models * Resistors, including linear resistor, diffused resistor, CMC two-terminal and three-terminal resistor, and physical resistor models * GaAs MESFET models, includes latest versions of GaAs, TOM2, TOM3, and Angelov * GaN MESFET models, including Angelov, ASM, and MVSG models * Silicon TFT models, including RPI Poly-Silicon and

Amorphous silicon Amorphous silicon (a-Si) is the non- crystalline form of silicon used for solar cells and thin-film transistors in LCDs. Used as semiconductor material for a-Si solar cells, or thin-film silicon solar cells, it is deposited in thin films ...

Thin-Film models * Verilog-A compact device models * Z and S domain sources * User-defined compiled model interface (CMI), allowing for the rapid inclusion of user-defined models * Josephson Junctions * Specialized reliability models (AgeMOS) for simulating the effect of HCI and BTI * Miscellaneous power models, including the relay, transformer, non-linear magnetic core, and winding * Miscellaneous RF models, including the DC block, DC feedthrough, and microstrip and stripline elements (bend, cross, corner, curve, open line, tee models)

Language and Netlist support

The

netlist In electronic design, a netlist is a description of the connectivity of an electronic circuit. In its simplest form, a netlist consists of a list of the electronic components in a circuit and a list of the nodes they are connected to. A netwo ...

formats, behavioral modeling languages, parasitic netlist formats, and stimulus files are common across the Spectre Simulation Platform. Supported formats include: # Spectre and SPICE netlist formats # Spectre, SPICE, and PSpice models # Verilog-A 2.0 LRM-compliant behavioral models and structural netlists # DSPF/SPEF parasitic formats # S-parameter data files in Touchstone, CITI-file, and Spectre formats # SST2, PSF, PSF XL, and FSDB

waveform In electronics, acoustics, and related fields, the waveform of a signal is the shape of its graph as a function of time, independent of its time and magnitude scales and of any displacement in time.David Crecraft, David Gorham, ''Electron ...

formats # Digital vector (VEC), Verilog-Value Change Dump (VCD), Extended Verilog-Value Change Dump (EVCD), and digital stimulus

Spectre simulation options

# The Spectre X-RF Option provides accurate and fast simulation for RFIC circuits and includes periodic steady-state, small-signal, and noise analyses along with harmonic balance (HB) analysis capabilities to maximize performance without loss in accuracy. Taking advantage of the Spectre X architecture, HB analysis can be distributed to multiple cores to power through the simulation task faster # The Spectre CPU Accelerator Option enables multi-thread simulation for transient and periodic steady-state analysis, extremely useful for verification of parasitic back-annotated designs across multiple CPUs # The Spectre Power Option provides dedicated transistor-level electro-migration and IR drop (EM-IR) analysis that can be used on the command line or within the front-to-back flow, leveraging the Cadence Voltus-Fi Custom Power Integrity Solution # Part of the Cadence Safety Solution providing fast fault injection and simulation to accelerate the functional safety closure of analog/mixed-signal designs

Spectre products

History

Spectre was developed at

Ken Kundert Kenneth S. Kundert is an engineer that is notable for his work in the area of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). He studied electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley under professors Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and Rob ...

and

Jacob K. White Jacob K. White is the Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He researches fast numerical algorithms for simulation, particularly the simulation of circuits. His wor ...

. The software is continuously being improved upon and developed further to bring high quality, accurate analog simulation. Spectre is currently a leading circuit simulator, competing with HSPICE and several others.

References

* Electronic circuit simulators {{Electronics-stub