aimspice vs TxACE Symposium

AIM-Spice analog circuit simulator. SPICE is the most commonly used analog circuit simulator today and is enormously important for the electronics industry. SPICE is a general purpose analog simulator which contains models for most circuit elements and can handle complex nonlinear circuits. The simulator can calculate dc operating points, perform transient analyses, locate poles and zeros for different kinds of transfer functions, find the small signal frequency response, small signal transfer functions, small signal sensitivities, and perform Fourier, noise, and distortion analyses. The simulator was developed at the University of California, Berkeley, and was first released in 1972. Many scientists at Berkeley and other institutions contributed to the development and improvement in subsequent versions of SPICE. In 1975, Nagel described the next major release of SPICE, called SPICE2. The core of the program still remained intact, even after many improvements and additions. These included improved device models, numerical techniques, and user interfaces. The last major release, SPICE3, came in 1985 with a conversion of the source code from FORTRAN to the C programming language. The Berkeley version of SPICE is a public domain program, but since the late 1970s a number of companies have released commercial versions of SPICE, providing further improvements in user support, in user interfaces, and, in certain cases, also in models and in simulation convergence. AIM-Spice is a new version of SPICE running under the Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. AIM-Spice for Windows is capable of displaying graphically the results of a simulation in progress, a feature that allows the operator to terminate a run based on an instant information on intermediate simulation results. The development of AIM-Spice was motivated by the need of a more user friendly interface, and as a vehicle for the new set of advanced device models for circuit simulation developed by our group.

As electronics continue to bridge the gap between the analog real world and digital information infrastructure, the entire $400 billion per year integrated circuits industry is evolving into an analog-digital mixed signal industry. This one-day symposium will examine trends, emerging opportunities and key challenges in analog integrated circuits and systems, as well as related technologies.