Analog Systems in VLSI, Fall 2004: Cadence circuit simulator

You should already be familiar with using Cadence on the computers in 1218 and 1235 Mudd. Some information is on the following pages

• Instructions for logging on to the VLSI Teaching machines http://www.cisl.columbia.edu/courses/spring-2004/ee4340/cad.html
• Instructions for setting up a remote X11 connection to the VLSI Teaching machines http://www.ee.columbia.edu/systems/x11.html

• Remotely running the design tools on our VLSI/CISL Teaching machines in Mudd 12th floor involves setting up an ssh connection to the machines and running an Xserver on your system. Instructions are at http://www.ee.columbia.edu/systems/x11.html

  You'll need a sufficiently fast internet connection(broadband)

  We will not be able to help you setting up that connection since it is too specific to your particular computing setup and internet connection.

Initial Setup

(If you have already used cadence often and have set it up for other courses/projects, you can ignore this and go straight to simulations. The only thing you need to ensure is to setup the model files correctly)

Copy the initial setup files into your home directory

• cp ~nkrishna/courses/E6316/profile ~/.profile
• cp ~nkrishna/courses/E6316/cdsinit ~/.cdsinit

The paths should be setup appropriately the next time you log on. You can start Cadence using the command icfb. For some reason, the default cdsinit doesn't seem to be loaded on startup. So in the CIW, type load("~/.cdsinit") This should set up the default simulator to be spectre

When you simulate the circuits, you need to use the appropriate model files for the transistors. The only transistors you will be using are the 3.3V MOS transistors in the tsmc025 library. In Analog artist, in the pulldown menu Setup -> Model Files, type /usr/tech/tsmc025/tsmc025/mix025_1.scs for modelfiles and tt_3v for section(see the figure below)

• A handout from a previous course can be found at here.
• A very brief introduction to the Waveform Calculator.