Digital Integrated Circuits - Design Tool Corner

Downloadable Tools

SPICE

The popularity of the SPICE circuit simulator has translated into various offerings, suited for different compute platforms. SPICE3, the latest Berkeley offering. It has the advantage of being freely available, to support a wide variety of models, and to run on all UNIX platforms. It is downloadable.

HSPICE  (from Avant!) offers a more robust, commercial version of SPICE. No free copies here. If interested, contact Avant!. 

PSPICE. This popular version of SPICE, available from Orcad (now Cadence) runs under the PC and Macintosh platforms. An evaluation version, which can handle small circuits with up to 10 transistors, is freely available. For a full fledged version or for more information, please contact Orcad. AIM-spice is a pc-version of SPICE with a revised user interface, simulation control, and with extra models. A student version can be downloaded. A complete list of all SPICE offerings (and software downloads for a wide range of platforms).

MAGIC

MAGIC is an interactive layout editor supporting on-line design rule checking and circuit extraction. It was developed by the group of John Ousterhout at the University of California at Berkeley. Click here to obtain a postscript version of the MAGIC tutorials (513851 Byte - tar format - compressed). Magic is downloadable. Versions for a variety of platforms can also be downloaded from the Digital Equipment Corporation MAGIC home page . You can also download the flea program (used in the software labs for the printing of the layouts). Observe that the latter has only been ported to the SUN platform. Another plot program, called MagicPlot is available from Yale

A newer, more modern version of MAGIC is available from a company called MicroMagic. Check their Web-page for up-to-date information on their layout program, called MAX, which runs under SUN Solaris and LINUX.

IRSIM

is a switch-level simulator for digital circuits. It was developed at Stanford university (in one of its latest incarnations). We will make IRSIM available over the net in the very near future. An on-line version of its users manuals is now available on-line.

Pointers to Other Tools and Libraries of Interest

To be updated.

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