Re: [Xcircuit-dev] XSPICE output possible?

[R. T. E. <ti...@mu...>]

Dear Svenn,

> I look back every day. The user interface and the file format sometimes make 
> me cry. All respect to Tim's work, but using postscript as a storage language 
> is just too awkward. Specially when that postscript cannot be included 
> pain-free into latex.

And if people *don't* complain regularly, then nothing ever gets done about
it.  Aside from the development I do for my own work, my harshest critics
are the ones who drive the direction and pace of development.  Generally,
though, I don't apologize for my user interface.  One assumes that all
schematic capture programs will generate a valid netlist, so I figured I'd
write the user interface the way I wanted to be.  Sort of like "vi" vs.
"emacs", you either like it or you don't.  If not, there are alternatives.

> I am a daily Cadence user and was looking for an easy way to generate 
> testbenches and documentation for testbenches, but ended up having each page 
> in a separate *.ps file in order to acceptbly get it into latex, and then the 
> feature to look at the entire testbench with gv was gone.

I addressed the problem in xcircuit version 3.6, but as I have not had
much time to write the 3rd tutorial, many of the new features are largely
undocumented.  The goal of version 3.6 was to do a better job of handling
large-scale projects with lots of subcircuits.  As long as each circuit
symbol has a property called "link", xcircuit will look for the subcircuit
in a file named by the link (by default, the name of the symbol + ".ps").
You can load the top-level cell of the hierarchy, and then load in the
entire hierarchy with "File->Load Dependencies".  Each subcircuit schematic
is a separate file, though, and so can be dropped into a latex document.

> I discovered qucs a while ago, and that one at least has a modern user 
> interface.

Looks like its strength is primarily as a simulator.  I hope they'll add
the harmonic balance simulation capability. . . the lack of it makes SPICE
non-competitive with SpectreRF and Eldo.

						---Tim

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| Dr. R. Timothy Edwards (Tim)   | email: ti...@op...    |
| Open Circuit Design, Inc.	 | web:   http://opencircuitdesign.com |
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