Re: [Gnucap-devel] Use of M as suffix for Mega

[Svenn Are Bjerkem]

On Friday 18 August 2006 23:02, al davis wrote:
> Gnucap has some extensions beyond Spice for behavioral modeling.  
> These made sense when they were done, but are now hopelessly
> obsolete and non-standard.  The functionalty and more is
> available in Verilog-AMS.  When Verilog works, should I remove
> the extensions?  My feeling is "yes", unless they are there for
> compatibility with some commercial version of Spice, which is
> usually HSPICE.  The semiconductor industry thinks of HSPICE,
> not Berkeley 3f5, as the standard.

If the functionality in Verilog-AMS is the same, then other non-standard 
extensions should be switched off. If it is feasible, grant a period where an 
annoying message about future remove will make the user aware of what is 
coming. 

Most simulators that I use do not have both analog and digital abilities but 
rely on probes to transport data from the analog simulator to the digital 
simulator and back again. If gnucap will handle both in one executable (like 
not relying on icarus verilog for the digital part) I would say it make no 
sense any longer to support spice syntax. You burn some bridges, but then you 
can focus on keeping up to date with the standard.

Look at what Synopsys is doing to HSPICE: They cram it together with their VCS 
digital simulator and call it Discovery AMS. Cadence cram Spectre with their 
ncsim digital simulators to get Spectre-AMS and Mentor Graphics cram eldo 
with modelsim to get the ADMS. 

Will gnucap be able to replace all that? I must be missing something here.

Future is Verilog-AMS or VHDL-AMS give or take what continent you live on. I 
prefer Verilog-AMS just because I hate writing all those port descriptions in 
VHDL.

-- 
Svenn