Chapter 10: SIMULATION

10-1: Introduction to Simulation

Electric has a built-in gate-level simulator called ALS (the Asynchronous Logic Simulator) that can simulate schematics, IC layout, or VHDL descriptions. In addition, Electric can produce input decks for many external simulators. This chapter describes the built-in simulator. For more information about the simulation interfaces, see Section 9-4.

For an example of simulation, open the library file "samples.txt" and edit the cell "tool-SimulateALS" (you can read the library with the Readable Dump subcommand of the Import command of the File menu). Then just issue the Simulate... subcommand of the Simulation (Built-in) command of the Tools menu.

A second simulation engine, Stanford's IRSIM, is also available for Electric. To obtain it, you must get the additional source code from Static Free Software. Most operations that apply to ALS work the same with IRSIM. In the rest of this chapter, things specific to one of the simulators are marked so.

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