Application Note

Top 10 New Features in theSmartSpice 2022 Baseline Release
Introduction
Silvaco’s SmartSpice™ is a high-performance, parallel SPICE simulator that provides a proven and comprehensive circuit analysis solution. Applications range
from complex, high-precision analog and mixed-signal
circuits to flat panel displays and TFT arrays, image sensors, memory designs, custom digital circuits, and characterization of standard cell libraries of advanced semiconductor processes, among many others.
SmartSpice offers multiple simulation flavors:• SmartSpice HPP: Silvaco’s High-Performance Parallelengine, for Fast Analog (a.k.a. Quasi-SPICE) engine;

6. Improved Spectre® compatibility mode: New featuresand better integration with Cadence® ADE;
7. Improvements in SmartSpice Pro: New featuresand improvements;
8. Improved Signal Integrity (SI) solution: More accurate
simulation of S-Elements and a brand-new Touchstone
file converter;
9. New measurement capabilities: Added TOP, BASE,MID, and SETTLING measurements to better support
Pulse signals; and10. Improved SOA checks: New features and improvements.

• SmartSpice Pro: Silvaco’s FastSPICE engine;

Continue reading and watch the embedded videos tolearn more about each of these features.

• SmartSpice RF: Silvaco’s bundled solution with several specialized engines needed for RF analyses;

1. Performance and Capacity Improvements• SmartSpice Server: Silvaco’s solution for distributed
simulation across nodes in a network;• Harmony: Silvaco’s solution for general analog/digitalco-simulation;and many more, as listed on www.silvaco.com/.
Silvaco’s SmartSpice team around the world has beenworking continuously to deliver top-notch quality andaddress customer requests. The team strives to makeSmartSpice an industry-leading SPICE simulator, andthey have been successful in achieving a significant
measure towards this goal over the last year.
In this document, we describe the top 10 new featuresand improvements implemented by the SmartSpice teamduring the past year; we are comparing the 2022 Baseline Release (SmartSpice 5.2.0.R) to the 2021 Baseline
Release (SmartSpice 5.0.3.R).

Performance (the ability to complete simulations in a shorter turnaround time without losing accuracy) and capacity(the ability to simulate larger circuits) have always been twoof the main R&D focuses of any SPICE simulator. This iscertainly no different for the Silvaco SmartSpice products.
Over the last year, great improvements have been madewith this regard, and the SmartSpice team is happy to announce that SmartSpice 5.2.0.R (Baseline 2022) is much
faster and memory optimized when compared to SmartSpice 5.0.3.R (Baseline 2021) for out-of-the-box simulations. In some cases, 7x performance speedup and 2x
memory reduction are seen, simultaneously. In other cases, by adopting a brand-new solver, speedups can get upto 25x when compared to the 2021 Baseline Release, andup to 37x when compared to the 2020 Baseline Release.
The following video presents more details about theseimprovements.

The top 10 new features and improvements are focusedon the following aspects:
1. Performance and capacity improvements: Up to
25x speedup and 2x less memory;
2. Improved user experience: Better interface for the user;
3. Improved Graphical User Interface (GUI): Faster andmore robust;
4. New built-In text editor: Faster, more stable, and fullof new features;
5. Improvements in SmartSpice RF: Enhanced Shooting
Newton and Harmonic Balance;

Page 1Figure 1. Baseline 2022 Compared to Previous Baselines

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2. Improved User Experience

4. New Built-In Text Editor

User experience can be defined as the way a person interacts with and feels about a system. In the 2022 Baseline Release, the SmartSpice team has made significant
improvements in the tool’s user experience.

The new GUI technology introduced last year, along with theGUI improvements brought this year (see Section 3), allowed
the SmartSpice team to deliver a brand-new built-in text editor. This new version brings a variety of improvements.

From this yearly release on, the SmartSpice users will
start experiencing more similar behaviors when using
the tool from different operating systems, or when interacting with it through different flows (e.g., standalone vs.
through Gateway, Silvaco’s schematic editor). Also, newcommand-line arguments are available, and the team isadopting a two-step approach to enable more meaningful behaviors. Finally, new messages are being printed
to the terminal and the log file in order to improve theoverall user experience.

The most important improvements and fixes include better user-interface response while handling large files,
fixes related to the lack of support for variable-width
fonts, and the addition of a series of functionalities notsupported before, such as the support for regular expressions for the “Find & Replace” feature, rectangular
block selection, and much more.
Learn more about these improvements in the following video.

Find more details about these improvements in the following video.

Figure 3. Improved Graphical User Interface and New Built-In

Text Editor

Figure 2. Improved User Experience in the 2022 Baseline Re-3. Improved Graphical User Interface (GUI)In the 2021 Baseline Release, the SmartSpice team added a major change with a new GUI technology. This year,
in the 2022 release, the team continues the process ofimproving GUI-related aspects of the tool.
By taking advantage of the new GUI technology, SmartSpice’s performance and robustness have been improved. In case of simulations that print many messages
to the GUI, the overall performance can be up to 2.5x
faster when compared to the 2021 release.
After listening to multiple requests from customers, functionalities such as the Toolbar Editor and the Icon Editor
were brought back in the 2022 Baseline Release.
More details about these improvements are presented in
the video in Figure 3.

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5. Improvements to SmartSpice RF
The 2022 Baseline Release also brings several enhancements for SmartSpice RF. These enhancements are not
only focused on improving the tool’s overall phase noise
simulation flow, but also entail specific improvements inboth the Shooting-Newton-based and the Harmonic-Balance-based phase noise computations.
Starting with some of the general improvements, SmartSpice RF now offers a much-improved Noise Contribution Table. With this, users can not only simulate accurate
phase noise analyses, but also understand precisely fromwhich devices the noise contributions are coming from.
Additionally, the internal implementation of switch elements was improved, making it less convergence prone.
Focusing on Shooting Newton first, the handling of themultiplicity factor “M” is greatly improved in the 2022 release, now delivering even more accurate results, as it
is demonstrated in Figure 4. Also, the recently released
Perturbation Projection Vector (PPV) algorithm for phasenoise can now specify the relative harmonic for which thenoise is to be simulated at.

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7. Improved SmartSpice Pro
With the ever-growing complexity of circuit designs, thechallenges of electrical verification are intensified. In
some cases, regular SPICE simulation cannot deliver
the desired set of results in due time, and FastSPICE engines become necessary. This is when SmartSpice Pro
comes into play.
Over the last year, SmartSpice Pro has also received
good attention from Silvaco’s R&D team. With this, a variety of improvements are being made available on its
2022 Baseline release, such as:• Support for External Sampling;• Support for “.LET” statements;• Improved support for “.option autostop”;
Figure 4. Improved Phase Noise Results Considering the ‘M’Multiplicity Factor

Now, focusing on the Hamonic Balance (HB) method, the2022 Baseline Release improves the convergence of its
transient initial guess (TIG). An accurate TIG is often crucial for HB methods, especially considering circuits withdigital signals, which have a dense spectrum.

6. Improved Spectre Compatibility Mode
The SmartSpice team continues to focus on extending
the tool’s compatibility with Spectre. In this 2022 Baseline Release, much has been done in this regard.
Among the important improvements in this year’s release, SmartSpice now supports the ANALOGMODEL
feature, allowing users to bind an instance to a modelusing a parameterized model name. Furthermore, a collection of smaller improvements adds much value to thiscompatibility mode, such as the support for protect/unprotect statements and the plotting of small-signal parameters.
Also, the SmartSpice integration with Cadence ADE hasalso been improved. Now, users can start using SmartSpice from within ADE for many more tasks.
The following is a list of short videos about SmartSpice’sSpectre Compatibility Mode and its integration with ADE:
SmartSpice in Spectre compatibility mode
Installing SmartSpice’s ADE Integration
Running SmartSpice from within Cadence ADE
SmartSpice accuracy settings from ADE

and much more.
We strongly encourage you to download the tool andcheck it out by yourself.

8. Improved Signal Integrity (SI) Solution
Each and every electrical signal, analog or digital, issubject to degrading effects, such as noise, distortion,and/or loss. This problem becomes even more importantwhen dealing with signals traveling over long distances
or at high frequencies in the design. Signal integrity solutions allow circuit designers to analyze and mitigate
these undesired effects at simulation time.
In this 2022 Baseline Release, SmartSpice’s Signal Integrity (SI) solution is much improved. The SI team has
added three major enhancements.
First, the simulations based on S elements are much
more accurate. This is due to enhancements in time
domain convolution algorithm, better impulse responsesmoothing, and a new method to enforce causality of Sparameters.
Additionally, the 2022 Baseline Release adds support for
Touchstone 2.0 features. This includes triangle formats,multiple reference resistances, mixed-mode order parameters, among others.
Finally, SmartSpice 5.2.0.R introduces a multipurpose
Touchstone File Converter feature. With this, users can
now perform any kind of Touchstone data conversions
consistent with Touchstone formats 1.0 and 2.0.
Learn more about the very useful Touchstone File Converter in the video embedded in Figure 5.

Parametric and Corner analyses with SmartSpicefrom ADE

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10. Improved SOA Checking
In circuit design, the safe operating area (SOA), defines
the voltage and current conditions over which devices
are expected to operate properly. In circuit simulation,model vendors can implement SOA checking mechanisms to report when devices are being operated underunsafe conditions.
In the SPICE world, one of the most important SOA
checks is related to the command “.biaschk”. These aresome of the improvements brought by the SmartSpiceteam in the 2022 Baseline Release:
Figure 5. Introduction to the Multipurpose Touchstone FileConverter

9. New Measurement Capabilities
Working with devices and designing components andsystems that operate in pulsed conditions is somethingordinary in the day-to-day work of IC designers. Measuring pulsed signals is a critical step for the characterization and validation of such devices, components, andsystems. Find below a few important signal characteristics measured in these cases:• Added support for “.biaschk” under DC analyses; and• Extended the “.biaschk” functionality to monitor expressions for subcircuit definitions.
Additionally, the SOA checks performed by the simulators when using “.biaschk” can be time consuming. In
some cases, the designers are aware of reports comingfrom the SOA checks and would like to ignore the warnings and proceed with their simulations. In cases suchas these, turning off the SOA-checking mechanisms canrepresent a significant speedup. This can now be donein the 2022 Baseline Release by adding “.option biaswarn=2” to input decks.

• TOP, BASE, and MID: voltage levels corresponding tohigh, low, and middle states of a signal; and• SETTLING: how long a signal transition takes to reacha steady state.
These measurements, although basic from a designer’s
perspective, usually require a collection of measurements in SPICE level.
The SmartSpice 2022 Baseline Release adds new measurement capabilities that allow designers to reach theaforementioned measurements in a much simpler way.
Learn more about it in the video embedded in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Introduction to the New Pulse Measurement Capabilities

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