RF Design Blogs

Hi Folks,

A question that I've often received from designers, "Is there a method to determine the amount of memory required before I submit a job?  I use distributed processing and need to provide an estimate before submitting jobs."

The answer is yes!  And this feature has helped me personally when submitting large harmonic balance simulation jobs.

MMSIM 13.1 ISR 6 and MMSIM 13.1 USR1 include a new memory estimator for harmonic balance simulations. You can use the memory estimator for planning your compute farm resources before submitting memory-consuming jobs.
 
The default is  memoryestimate="no".                        
 
When set to "yes", it turns on the harmonic balance memory usage estimate mode, and a memory estimate is printed in the spectre.out log file.
 
In memory estimate mode, a short simulation is performed first, and the engine exits after printing the estimate in the log file, without saving harmonic balance results.

Things to note:

• The memory estimator is available in Spectre RF standalone.  To use it in the Virtuoso ADE GUI, you must go to the Misc tab in the harmonic balance options form and add memoryestimate=yes to the additionalParams field.
• You must turn memoryestimate off to perform an actual simulation
• Memory estimation is not recommended for simulations that require less than approximately 500MB
• For PSS analysis, the memory estimate mode doesn't apply unless flexbalance=yes
• The memory estimator applies to large-signal analysis only, and it doesn't include subsequent noise or other small-signal simulations

Let me know how you like it!

Best regards,

Tawna