About Design Kit Model Verification

Many designers would like to take advantage of the powerful simulation capabilities of Advanced Design System from Agilent Technologies. In order to use ADS effectively, designers must have access to a set of required models. Agilent Technologies is addressing this need by providing the translated ADS model files for distribution in the form of ADS design kits. With the information provided in this document, the models used in these ADS design kits can be verified against other simulator models such as Hspice and Spectre.

Advanced Design System

Advanced Design System (ADS) has been developed specifically to simulate the entire communications signal path. This unique solution integrates the widest variety of proven RF, DSP, and electromagnetic design tools into a single, flexible environment. Building on years of expertise developing new technologies for our EDA tools, such as Series IV and MDS, Advanced Design System provides a broad range of high-performance capability. This makes it easy to explore design ideas, then model the electrical and physical design of the best candidates.

ADS Design Kit Model Verification Tool

Verification of the translated design kit models is one of the most important steps in the overall design kit creation process. This step is typically the most technically challenging and time consuming. The ADS Design Kit Model Verification process utilizes a library verification tool that helps to simplify many of the steps required to verify device models for use with a foundry's device and process parameter sets. This Perl script driven tool is used to verify that results from the ADS simulator match the output from the native simulator for design kit models that were translated from other formats such as Hspice or Spectre.

The model verification tool verifies that the outputs from the ADS simulator match the results from the foundry benchmark data to within a specified margin of error. The foundry benchmark data is typically the output from SPICE simulations of the foundry's test circuits. For more information on simulators supported by the Design Kit Model Verification tool, refer to Supported Simulators.

Intended Audience

The audience intended for this manual consists of people involved in ADS design kit creation and model verification. The audience includes design kit developers and CAD administrators. Because the ADS Design Kit Model Verification tool is a script driven tool, the audience using this manual is expected to know some Practical Extraction Report Language ( Perl ) scripting and object oriented programming in order to perform advanced operations.

For simple circuits, you may be able to perform a verification with minimal Perl scripting knowledge. This document has been written to include examples for those who might not have the skills, but still want to verify simple circuits. The document provides predefined scripts that you can copy and modify for basic operation.

If you are a novice Perl user, review the section on Using Perl to help you get started.

The Design Kit Model Verification Tool Process

The basic steps for using the ADS Design Kit Model Verification tool are as follows:

Install the default template and parameter modules.
Build a script header to use in your own scripts.
Create any custom template & parameter scripts and then add them to the default modules.
Create a test script and run it to simulate your test circuits.
If you receive errors, review the error logs, modify your scripts to correct the errors, and re-run the simulation.
If no errors occur, set up an ADS Data Display template to view your results.
Compare your simulation results between the different simulators.
Document your simulation results using the ADS Electronic Notebook.

Building a Basic Script describes the details for performing the operations listed above. Design Kit Model Verification Process Flow on the following page shows a simple process flowchart of the process described above.

Design Kit Model Verification Process Flow

What's in this Manual

This guide contains the information needed to verify an ADS design kit model against another simulator design kit model. Most of the details are applicable for all work involving design kit model verification but some optional steps may be skipped for simpler kits or smaller installations.

Setting up the Design Kit Model Verification Tool describes the information needed to setup the design kit model verification tools such as setting up environment variables.

Building a Basic Script provides several examples that describe the steps necessary for using the design kit model verification tool. These steps are briefly described in The Design Kit Model Verification Tool Process.

Building an Advanced Script provides an example of building a more complex design kit test circuit script. The end of the chapter also provides several tables that describe the functions available in the design kit model verification tool. These tables give a description for each function as well as usage syntax.

Comparing Simulation Results describes how to setup templates for viewing your simulation results within an ADS Data Display and how to do script based comparisons.

Documenting Your Simulation Results describes the fundamentals of using the ADS Electronic Notebook.

Minimum ADS Installation Requirements

ADS 2003A or later is the minimum requirement for using the ADS Design Kit Model Verification Tool described in this manual.