How to add options to the SPICE/Spectre command run by MODELZEN

SA Support Team Staff 2019-03-15

I am encountering a case where Spectre simulation run by MODELZEN is being aborted prematurely due to a shortage of license. I know I can make Spectre wait for an extended period by supplying an additional option such as "+lqtimeout 900" to the spectre command. But how do I define these simulator options for MODELZEN?

1 Answers

Vote Up 1 Vote Down

Best Answer

SA Support Team Staff 2019-03-15

You can customize the simulation commands used by MODELZEN by defining the 'sim_cmd' property in the technology configuration file. For instance, the 'sim_cmd' property has the following default settings, each of which defines the command for launching an HSPICE, Spectre, and FineSim simulation, respectively:

sim_cmd['hspice'] = lambda deck, log, outdir: ['hspice', '-i', deck, '-o', log]
sim_cmd['spectre'] = lambda deck, log, outdir: ['spectre', '+lqsleep', '10', '+lqtimeout', '900', '=l', log, '-outdir', outdir, deck]
sim_cmd['finesim'] = lambda deck, log, outdir: ['finesim', '-spice', deck, '-log', log, '-out', outdir+'/']

So, you can change the name or path of the command executable and add or modify various options by redefining this property. Note that each command and its options are defined as an array of parsed tokens, following the convention of the Python's subprocess module. For more information, please refer to Section 4.2 Defining SPICE Simulation Option in the MODELZEN User Guide.