GARDENA, CA—Intusoft has announced the awarding of US patent 7,110,929 B1 to the company’s president and founder, Lawrence Meares, for the development of “System and Method of Providing Additional Circuit Analysis Using Simulation Templates.” The capability has been a key provision in the control of SPICE circuit simulation, custom waveform processing, and interaction with these processes by users of Intusoft’s tools.
In October, the ICAP/4 8.x.11 Build 2817 SPICE simulation tool suite was announced at the Power Systems World ‘06 convention in Long Beach, CA. But for years ICAP/4 has extensively employed the now patented simulation templates. Templates are comprised of embedded scripts that are programmed using Intusoft’s “Interactive Command Language” (ICL) for custom analysis of analog, mixed-signal, and mixed-system design. As far back as the 1980s, Intusoft brought to fruition what Berkeley attempted as a fully functional SPICE scripting language.
A simulation template has embedded instructions that tell a SPICE netlist where to insert key information that will affect a design simulation, including special options. It expands SPICE beyond traditional limitations by allowing design parameter variations and multiple simulation passes to run under one analysis umbrella. Simulation templates automatically enable component parametric variation for special analyses like extreme-value, root summed squares and design optimization. They provide charting of post-simulation electrical measurements with compliance to pass/fail limits across a design— a unique capability with Intusoft’s ICAP/4 SPICE simulation.
“Interactive scripts” enable users to perform real-time parametric variation on parts by assigning a new value (i.e., transistor beta), sweep or expression to the parameter, all with no schematic interaction and with simulation waveforms shown in real time. A simulation template can be modified to alter parametric limits (i.e., from 3 sigma to 6 sigma), as found in Monte Carlo statistical analysis.
This marks the second US patent awarded to Intusoft. Meares was granted patent US 6,230,305 B1 in May 2001 for the invention of a layered configurable schematic.
For additional information, see the Intusoft website at www.intusoft.com