Recently, the “GOLDEN LIGHT SPICE” created by the faculty team from the School of Integrated Circuit in SZPT was officially released at the “2022 China (Shenzhen) IC Summit”. As a domestic autonomous and controllable IC EDA product, it can fully support scientific research and teaching in the field of integrated circuit, and boost technical breakthroughs in core aspects and key fields of integrated circuit design and manufacturing in China.

“GOLDEN LIGHT SPICE” debuted at China Hi-Tech Fair

The integrated circuit industry mainly consists of integrated circuit design, advanced manufacturing and integrated circuit closed test. EDA (Electronic Design Automation) is the core of integrated circuit design, and without EDA, no integrated circuit design can be completed. IC EDA is composed of a series of specific EDA tools, among which SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) developed by the University of California, Berkeley is the essential key technology in the design process of fully customized integrated circuit. The “GOLDEN LIGHT SPICE” released this time is an EDA product developed by the faculty team from the School of Integrated Circuit in SZPT based on such technology.

The project leader Yu Fei was introduced details about “GOLDEN LIGHT SPICE”officially released in the form of video at the special forum of the summit

According to Yu Fei, the project leader and deputy dean of the School of Integrated Circuit in SZPT, “GOLDEN LIGHT SPICE” is similar to international mainstream simulation tools, which can support the nanoscale BSIM3, BSIM4, BSIM5 and other advanced process models, and achieve high precision simulation at the transistor level, while the cost is much lower than similar international mainstream products. In addition to supporting simulation, “GOLDEN LIGHT SPICE” also has a friendly interface and strong operability, embedded with massive teaching resources and cases. It can be applied in fields of integrated circuit design, scientific research and school-based curriculum teaching.

“GOLDEN LIGHT SPICE” tool interface

“GOLDEN LIGHT SPICE” offers a very easy-to-use circuit diagram editor, which can quickly convert the circuit diagram and related simulation control into SPICE netlist for high-speed SPICE simulation, fully compatible with the circuit level simulation tool HSPICE’s model syntax and custom syntax. Besides, “GOLDEN LIGHT SPICE” also offers the “simulation control virtual device”, which can directly add the simulation type, temperature and precision control on the property page, and at the same time, offers such devices as the transformer and custom devices, and sets default model parameters, for convenience of users to carry out functional qualitative simulation. Meanwhile, the tool can support private customization,i.e. the customized module is directly introduced into the system, without the need for secondary production, convenient for realizing the project management function and hierarchical call function.

In terms of school-based curriculum teaching, “GOLDEN LIGHT SPICE” cansupport courses such as “Analog CMOS Circuit Design”, “Fully Customized Integrated Circuit Design” and “Integrated Circuit Design Technology”, and support the simulation design and principle teaching for hundreds of circuits, including standard CMOS logic gate, CCMOS circuit, domino circuit, pre-charging circuit, oscillator circuit, BGR circuit, amplifier, SRAM, regulator circuit, etc.

The emergence of “GOLDEN LIGHT SPICE” is a major breakthrough of Shenzhen in respect of the autonomous and controllable IC technology, which is of great significance to the training of talents in the field ofintegrated circuit, and can boost technical breakthroughs in core aspects and key fields of integrated circuit design and manufacturing in China.

(Tang Yanbin, School of Electronic and Communication Engineering)