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Chapter 1 Introduction
does not behave as expected. If the problem can be reproduced on a simulator then its
cause can be much more easily identified. Even if a problem cannot be reproduced then
this gives some clues. It means that it is caused by something that is not modelled, a
wiring parasitic perhaps.
Simulation is extremely useful for testing ideas at the system level. Sometimes it is not
easy to test a concept because the hardware to implement it is very costly or time
consuming to build. It may even be that you don't know how to implement the idea in
hardware at all. The alternative is to design a model and simulate it with a computer.
Once it has been established that the concept is viable then attention can be given to its
implementation. If it proves not to be viable, then a great deal of time will have been
saved.
System Requirements
Operating System
Windows
Requires Windows NT4 with service pack 6 or Windows 2000 or Windows XP or any
later system.
SIMetrix 5 will not install or run on Windows 95, 98 or ME
Linux
Currently tested and supported distributions are:
Redhat 7.2, 7.3, 8.0 and 9.0
SuSE 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 and 9.0
See http://www.catena.uk.com for information on the latest supported distributions.
Hardware
SIMetrix will run satisfactorily on any hardware that is sufficient to run the machine’s
operating system.
Recommended System
If you regularly run large circuit simulations or long runs on smaller circuits, we
recommend investing in the most powerful CPU available. A large RAM system can
be useful as this will allow caching of simulation data. This will speed up plotting
results if a large amount of data is generated. The data is stored to disk in an efficient
manner and therefore substantial RAM is not essential unless the circuits being
simulated are very large indeed. 20,000 MOSFETs requires around 64MBytes. A high
performance bus mastering SCSI disk system will improve simulation performance a
little.
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