[paper] Modeling, simulation and implementation of circuit elements in an open-source tool set on the FPAA

Modeling, simulation and implementation of circuit elements in an open-source tool set on the FPAA

Aishwarya Natarajan and Jennifer Hasler

Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta USA

Analog Integr Circ Sig Process (2017), pp 1–12

doi:10.1007/s10470-016-0914-y

ABSTRACT: An open-source simulator to design and implement circuits and systems, replicating the results from the Field Programmable Analog Array (FPAA) is presented here. The fundamental components like the transistors, amplifiers and floating gate devices have been modeled based on the EKV model with minimal parameters. Systems including continuous-time filters and the analog front-end of a speech processing system have been built from these basic components and the simulation results and the data from the FPAA are shown. The simulated results are in close agreement to the experimental measurements obtained from the same circuits compiled on the FPAA fabricated in a 350 nm process [read more...]

FOSS CAD research is in the spotlight

The conference paper "FOSS as an efficient tool for extraction of MOSFET compact model parameters" reached 20 reads at the researchgate.net

FOSS as an efficient tool for extraction of MOSFET compact model parameters

D. Tomaszewski, G. Głuszko, M. Brinson, V. Kuznetsov and W. Grabinski

MIXDES 2016, Lodz, pp. 68-73.

doi: 10.1109/MIXDES.2016.7529702

Abstract—A GNU Octave – based application for device-level compact model evaluation and parameter extraction has been developed. The applications main features are as follows: experimental I-V data importing, generating input data for different circuit simulation programs, running the simulation program to calculate I-V characteristics of the specified models, calculating model misfit and its sensitivity to selected parameter variation, and the comparison of experimental and simulated characteristics. Measured I-V data stored by different measurement systems are accepted. Circuit simulations may be done with Ngspice, Qucs and LTSpiceIV. Selected aspects of the application are presented and discussed. 

QUCS mentioned in IEEE-EDL paper

Jacopo Iannacci, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Trento, Italy, has recently published an article in the IEEE Electron Device Letters (EDL) where he used and explicitly mentioned the QUCS, FOSS CAD/EDA simulator:

RF-MEMS Technology for Future Mobile and High-Frequency Applications:

Reconfigurable 8-Bit Power Attenuator Tested up to 110 GHz

J. Iannacci, M. Huhn, C. Tschoban and H. Pötter

in IEEE EDL, vol. 37, no. 12, pp. 1646-1649, Dec. 2016.

Abstract: In this letter, we present and test—to the best of our knowledge, for the first time—, an 8-bit (256-state) reconfigurable RF-MEMS attenuator, from 10 MHz up to 110 GHz, realized in the CMM-FBK technology. Resistive loads, in series and shunt configuration, are selectively inserted on the RF line by means of electrostatic MEMS ohmic switches. The network exhibits several attenuation levels in the range of −10/−45 dB that are rather flat up to 50 GHz, and a certain number of configurations with VSWR smaller than 4 from nearly dc up to 110 GHz, and better than 2 on a frequency span of ~80 GHz.

doi: 10.1109/LED.2016.2623328

[read more: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7726036&isnumber=7739309]

FOSDEM 2017 EDA Devroom Call for Participation

FOSDEM 2017 Electronic Design Automation Devroom
Call for Participation

This is the call for participation in the FOSDEM 2017 devroom on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, to be held on Sunday 5 February 2017 in Brussels, Belgium. We are looking for contributions under the form of talks and tutorials covering the following main topics:

• Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design tools (e.g. KiCad and gEDA)
• Analogue and digital simulators (e.g. ngspice, Qucs, Gnucap, Xyce, GHDL, Icarus and Verilator)
• Any other EDA tools such as high-level tools for digital hardware design (e.g. Migen) and HDL synthesis tools (e.g.Yosys)
• Inter-project opportunities for collaboration

We hope to provide an opportunity for attendees to bring themselves up to date on the latest FOSS EDA developments, share knowledge and identify opportunities to collaborate on development tasks. Have a look at last year's event for a taste of what the EDA devroom is about.

The submission process
Please submit your proposals at 

https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM17 

before 1 December 2016.

If you already have a Pentabarf account (for example as a result of having submitted a proposal in the past), make sure you use it to log in and submit your proposal. Do not create a new account if you already have one. Please provide a bit of information about yourself under Person -> Description -> Abstract. When you submit your proposal (creating an "Event" in Pentabarf), make sure you choose the "Electronic Design Automation (EDA) devroom" in the track drop-down menu. Otherwise your proposal might go unnoticed. Fill in at least a title and abstract for the proposed talk and a suggested duration. Bear in mind that a lot of the value in these meetings comes from the discussions, so please be reasonable regarding the duration of the talk.

Important dates

• 1 December 2016: deadline for submission of proposals
• 11 December 2016: announcement of final schedule
• 5 February 2017: devroom day

Recordings
The FOSDEM organisers hope to be able to live-stream and record all the talks. The recordings will be published under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). Only presentations will be recorded, not informal discussions and whatever happens during the lunch break. By agreeing to present at FOSDEM, you automatically give permission to be recorded. The organisers will agree to make exceptions but only for exceptional and well-reasoned cases.
Mailing list

Feel free to subscribe to the mailing list of the EDA devroom to submit ideas, ask questions and generally discuss about the event.

Spread the word!
This is the third EDA devroom at FOSDEM. The first two were very well received. Let's make sure as many projects and developers as possible are present. Thanks!

SourceForge Project: FreeCAD

FreeCAD is a general purpose feature-based, parametric 3D modeler for CAD, MCAD, CAx, CAE and PLM, aimed directly at mechanical engineering and product design but also fits a wider range of uses in engineering, such as architecture or other engineering specialties. It is 100% Open Source and extremely modular, allowing for very advanced extension and customization.

FreeCAD is based on OpenCasCade, a powerful geometry kernel, features an Open Inventor-compliant 3D scene representation model provided by the Coin 3D library, and a broad Python API. The interface is built with Qt. FreeCAD runs exactly the same way on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux platforms. [Download FreeCAD]

LibreCAD: Call for Your POTM Vote

The vote for April 2016 Community Choice SourceForge Project of the Month is now available, and will run until March 15, 2016 12:00 UTC. Here is one of the candidates:

LibreCAD is a fully comprehensive 2D CAD application that you can download and install for free. LibreCAD is an Open Source community-driven project: development is open to new talent and new ideas, and our software is tested and used daily by a large and devoted user community; you, too, can get involved and influence its future development. LibreCAD has GPLv2 public license – you can use it, customize it, hack it and copy it with free user support and developer support from our active worldwide community and our experienced developer team. There is a large base of satisfied LibreCAD users worldwide, and it is available in more than 20 languages and for all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Suse, etc. 

Download LibreCAD now.

Alliance: FOSS VLSI/CAD System

Alliance is a complete set of free cad tools and portable libraries for VLSI design. It includes a VHDL compiler and simulator, logic synthesis tools, and automatic place and route tools. A complete set of portable CMOS libraries is provided. Alliance is the result of a twelve year effort spent at SoC department of LIP6 laboratory of the Pierre & Marie Curie University (Paris VI, France). Alliance has been used for research projects such as the 875 000 transistors StaCS superscalar microprocessor and 400 000 transistors IEEE Gigabit HSL Router.

Alliance VLSI CAD System is free software. Binaries, source code and cells libraries are freely available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). You are welcome to use the software package even for commercial designs without any fee. You are kindly requested to mention: "Designed with Alliance © LIP6, Université Pierre et Marie Curie".

ICs Designed with Alliance

• Smartlabs/Smarthome designed a complete circuit in the XFAB XH035 technology (2014).
• Tokai University (Shimizu Lab) designed the SNX, a 16 bits processor in the ROHM 0.18µm (2010).

Useful Links

• Improved Standard Cell libraries and documentation on how to design them, by Graham Petley: VLSI Technology
• A book presenting Alliance in depth: Introduction to VLSI CMOS Circuits design by Carlos SilvaCardenas, Takeo Yoshida & Alberto Palacios Pawlovsky.
• For Spanish readers, a set of tutorials made by Miguel Eduardo Flores Gomez from Don Bosco University: Tutorial de Alliance

[read more...]

gEDA Edinburgh meetup - Saturday 6th February 2016

gEDA Edinburgh Meetup

Saturday 6th February 2016

---------- Fwd message ----------
From: "Peter TB Brett"
Date: 3 Feb 2016 13:57
Subject: gEDA Edinburgh meetup - Saturday 6th February 2016 
----------

Hi all,
There will be a UK meet-up and hack day this weekend.

• Edinburgh, UK
  Saturday 6th of February

It'll be at my place, so if you want to come, send me a direct e-mail and I'll send details by private e-mail.

Sorry for the short notice. It's on Saturday so as not to conflict with the PCB hack day on Sunday.

Peter Clifton and I will both be there, and everybody else who can attend for all or some of the day will be welcome. We'll also be using the #geda channel on irc.oftc.net

If you use or develop free and open source system (FOSS) design and simulation software, you'd be welcome to attend!

Peter

---------- End of Fwd message ----------

Free Computational Electromagnetic Modeling Codes

The software in this list is either free or available at a nominal charge and can be downloaded over the internet. Some of the codes require the user to register with the distributor's web site. If you are familiar with other free EM modeling software that that should be added to this list, please send the name of the software, a hypertext link, and a brief description to CVEL-L@clemson.edu.

This page has been translated into Italian here, Serbo-Croatian here, Slovakian here, Swedish here and Polish here and here.

(Page last update: December 14, 2015 )

ASAP - Antenna Scatterers Analysis Program
AtaiTec Free 2D Field Solver
ATLC - Arbitrary Transmission Line Calculator
ATLC2 - Arbitrary Transmission Line Calculator 2
emAnalyze
EMAP
EMCoS Antenna VLab SV
EM Explorer
emGine Environment
ERMES
FastCap and FastHenry
FEKO LITE
FEMM - Finite Element Method Magnetics
gprMax
MagNet (Infolytica)
MMANA-GAL (basic version)
MEEP
MMTL
Multiple Multipole (MMP) Algorithms
NEC2
newFasant (student version)
openEMS
pdnMesh
Puma-EM
Qsci
Radia
SATE Static Field Analysis Toolkit (Educational)
Students' QuickField
Sonnet Lite
Trace Analyzer

FOSDEM 2016 EDA Devroom

FOSDEM 2016: EDA Devroom

Room: AW1.121 

Saturday, 30 January 2016

Software developers have a much easier time sharing their developments than hardware designers. When you put a piece of code on the Web, you don't ask yourself if others will have the freedom and resources to access a text editor to look at it and modify it, or a compiler or interpreter to have the code do something useful. The landscape for hardware designs is more complicated. The dominant design and simulation tools are proprietary, and there is not even a de-facto proprietary standard format to share designs. The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Devroom looks at recent progress in Free CAD/EDA Tools for hardware design and simulation, and serves as a meeting place for discussion about future collaborations and FOSS developments. Come and see how some of these tools are actually catching up, and sometimes even more, in terms of features and quality.

[EDA Devroom Detailed Agenda]

[Call for Participation] FOSDEM 2016 Electronic Design Automation Devroom

 Call for Participation 

FOSDEM 2016 Electronic Design Automation Devroom 

This is the call for participation in the FOSDEM 2016 devroom on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, to be held on Saturday 30 January 2016 in Brussels, Belgium. We are looking for contributions under the form of talks covering the following main topics:

• Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design tools (e.g. KiCad and gEDA)
• Analogue and digital simulators (e.g. ngspice, Qucs, Gnucap, Xyce, GHDL, Icarus and Verilator)
• Any other EDA tools such as high-level tools for digital hardware design (e.g. Migen)
• Inter-project opportunities for collaboration

We hope to provide an opportunity for attendees to bring themselves up to date on the latest FOSS EDA developments, share knowledge and identify opportunities to collaborate on development tasks. Have a look at last year's event for a taste of what the EDA devroom is about.

The submission process
Please submit your proposals at https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM16 

before 4 December 2015.

If you already have a Pentabarf account (for example as a result of having submitted a proposal in the past), make sure you use it to log in and submit your proposal. Do not create a new account if you already have one. Please provide a bit of information about yourself under Person -> Description -> Abstract. When you submit your proposal (creating an "Event" in Pentabarf), make sure you choose the "EDA devroom" in the track drop-down menu. Otherwise your proposal might go unnoticed. Fill in at least a title and abstract for the proposed talk and a suggested duration. Bear in mind that a lot of the value in these meetings comes from the discussions, so please be reasonable regarding the duration of the talk.

Important dates

• 4 December 2015: deadline for submission of proposals
• 18 December 2015: announcement of final schedule
• 30 January 2016: devroom day

[Read More]

Octave-Forge Community Choice POTM

The Octave-Forge packages -- Community Choice Project of the Month for July

For one of the July "Community Choice" Projects of the Month, the community elected Octave-Forge, a central location for the collaborative development of packages for GNU Octave, a high-level interpreted language. The Octave-Forge packages expand Octave's core functionality by providing field specific features via Octave's package system. Some of the individual Octave-Forge packages include: image and signal processing, fuzzy logic, instrument control, and statistics packages.

Download Octave-Forge now.

Related Projects:

• VFreeMat--An interpreted, matrix-oriented development environment for engineering and scientific applications.
• AquaTerm--A Mac OS X grahics renderer.
• Quite Universal Circuit Simulator--A circuit simulator with graphical user interface (GUI)

QUCS: Project of the Week, June 1, 2015

 The Qucs is one of the featured projects for the week (June 1, 2015), which appear on the front page of SourceForge.net:

 Qucs is a circuit simulator with a graphical user interface. The software aims to support all kinds of circuit simulation types such as, e.g. DC, AC, S-parameter, Transient, Noise, and Harmonic Balance analysis. Pure digital simulations are also supported.
[ Download Quite Universal Circuit Simulator ]