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Spectre simulations (sometimes) fail when started through analog environment

IronRing

 This has been a widespread problem at my University for some time now.  Sometimes everything works fine with simulations.  Other times (apparently at random) Spectre simulations will not work when started through the Analog Environment.  When it starts to fail, it generally will continue to do so for a long period and restarting Cadence does not help.  If I try again the next day sometimes it will work, other times it won't.  When it fails to run, the spectre.out window displays a message similar to "Simulation failed.  See output.log file for more information."  However, this file is not created.

 When this happens we use a workaround to run simulations: Using the console, we browse to the simulation/Design_Name/spectre/schematic directory and run the Spectre command from the command line, using the command that has been set up in ADE.  This always works, and the results can be loaded into ADE and analyzed as usual.  The problem with this workaround, other than being a hassle, is that there is no way to run parametric simulations (as far as I can figure out).

Versions being used are:
ICFB/ADE 5.10.41.500.5.128
Spectre 6.2.1.390

Our servers are Sun machines.The problem seems to be independent of design kits, and will even appear for the simplest circuits (eg. a voltage source, resistor and ground from analogLib).

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

Parents

  • As advised, upgrade your MMSIM to the latest hotfix. Check with your foundry pdk documentation what version of MMSIM, IC, ASSURA, etc... the foundry used to validate the pdk before simulating and try to stick with those versions.

    I see this problem sometimes but it seems to be specific to certain machines (Netlist & Run, no output log and spectre stalls, after a minute icfb reports problem). We have a UNIX lab running Solaris 10 and sometimes the error is resolved by simply going to another workstation and running the simulation.

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  • As advised, upgrade your MMSIM to the latest hotfix. Check with your foundry pdk documentation what version of MMSIM, IC, ASSURA, etc... the foundry used to validate the pdk before simulating and try to stick with those versions.

    I see this problem sometimes but it seems to be specific to certain machines (Netlist & Run, no output log and spectre stalls, after a minute icfb reports problem). We have a UNIX lab running Solaris 10 and sometimes the error is resolved by simply going to another workstation and running the simulation.

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