Curious about the latest Spectre Simulator update? There’s a new app note that’s got you covered. Here are the highlights of what’s new in the Spectre Simulator.
Do you have disk space constraints? Are you generating too much waveform data? In the past the only option to reduce data volume was to reduce the number of signals being saved. This approach works if you know what you want to save before you start but is problematic if you are trying to debug a problem. In ISR6, there are new time-based options to manage the waveform data. The first option is a global option—save_time_window. It defines time windows, waveform data will only to be saved during the time windows. If there some blocks where more or less detail is required, then the local time_window option can be used. Local time windows have precedence over the global window, so be aware of that if you’re using both.
Fault simulations can be quite long because the same simulation is repeated for every fault. In ISR6, a new Transient Fault Analysis, TFA, method has been introduced enabling fault injection after a user defined event occurs, for example, injecting faults after a PLL has locked. A new feature “Event Triggered by Assert (ETA)” allows triggering events based on the results of an assertion. Other new parameters for TFA analysis include: faultic, faultstrobe, and faultrampinterval. For the faultic parameter, the default is no; you get the existing implementation. For yes, the Spectre Simulator will perform a dc analysis before each fault injection when faultmethod=leadtime is used. The faultstrobe parameter can be used to reduce disk space for fault simulation. The user defines time points when waveform data will be saved and only the data will be saved at these time points. Control options include:
· strobestart|strobestop|strobestep
· strobeperiod
· skipstart|skipstop
Lastly, the faultrampinterval parameter defines how to ramp the value of the fault over the fault injection time interval.
For more details about these new changes, check out the app note here.