Subject: Spice_to_ibis

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 08 Dec 94 08:06:42 EST

Folks,

I cannot make the meeting on Friday 12/9/94 as I will be out of town, but I
want to update you on spice_to_ibis (S2IBIS --- Thanks DOS, long live
Linux).

We are beginning to ramp up again to do the following,

   Improve the documentation.  This is the cause of most problems.
   It will reduce support time involving us (We figure around 100 different
   groups have contacted us.) and applications engineers at CAE vendors.
   Boy if you work out the cost savings ... 

   Enhance the error reporting by S2IBIS by providing suggestions as to
   what to do in the case of errors.

   There have been a number of problems with S2IBIS using HSpice.  We
   regard that (at least our version of HSpice) has a bug relating to
   connectivity of nodes through nested subcircuits.  This has caused grief
   with some driver models.  We need to work with MetaSoft on this.

   Some drivers do not have IBISv1.1 models.  Mostly this is because of the
   50 ohm load specification for ramps.  The only way around this is to
   move to v2.1.

   Provide limited extensions so that we can produce partial
   v2.1 models.  We will use the priorities that have been floating around
   on the net for the last few days.

   Add support for more flavors of Spice.  Especially CADENCE's Spectre.

   We hope to provide an interim release by the end of January.

The above is per the kind graces of CADENCE who will fund a student for 
three months. (Note: the deal is not finalized but the principles are
confident.) We are still working on getting ARPA funding but this will
be sometime in the future.  S2IBIS needs development now.

We welcome receiving enhancements that you may have done to S2IBIS for
inclusion in future releases.

Michael Steer
Associate Professor
North Carolina State University.