Tutorial 3: Using Spectre Directly

This material is by Steven Levitan for the environment at the University of Pittsburgh, Fall 2008.

We are using the NCSU 1.6 Beta CDK and Virtuoso 1.6.1.2

Please consult the NCSU EDA Wiki for background information

Many thanks to the team at NCSU for all their hard work!

Please see our tutorial on setting up the design environment and running Virtuoso

Generate a Base Netlist with Virtuoso

• Start the Cadence Design Framework (virtuoso)
• Use virtuoso to create and simulate an inverter schematic
• close the schematic, close the analog design environment and close the library manager
• Stay in the window that you ran "setup_all"

Create a New Netlist for this Exercise

• Find the netlist created by virtuoso - it should be in ~/cadence/simulation/<cellname>/spectre/schematic/netlist/input.scs
• Copy this file into your projects directory
• Edit this file to add the components you need

Run Spectre Directly

• run spectre as

[steve@SB3 ~/projects]$ spectre input.scs

• You should see an output log like you get from virtuoso, but this time in the window you are running in.

• Pipe the results to a pager to see things more slowly

[steve@SB3 ~/projects]$ spectre input.scs | more

• You should see the last line "spectre completes with 0 errors..."

View the Results

• In the Virtuoso command window open the Results Viewer
•     Tools -> ADE L -> Results Browser

 

• This should open the results browser

• Use the File->browse command to find your directory  input.raw

• Open the tran-tran folder

• Click on signals to see them plotted on the waveform viewer