[Xastir] OT: Why I haven't been working on Xastir much this year.

[Tom Russo]

I don't know how many folks on this list ever do any circuit simulation,
but since my last year has been totally focused on getting this release out,
I'm going to post this here.

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Announcing the Open Source Release of Xyce 6.0

November 5, 2013 -  Xyce, Sandia National Laboratories' SPICE-compatible
parallel circuit simulator, is available for free public download for the
first time.  Xyce has been developed internally at Sandia National
Laboratories and funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration's
Advanced Strategic Computing (ASC) Program.  By open-sourcing Xyce, the code
team hopes to foster external collaborations and solicit feedback from the
simulation community.

Parallel Implementation
Xyce was designed as a parallel simulation code.  Primarily, the parallelism
is based around a message-passing implementation (MPI).  Parallel scaling
is very problem-specific, but for certain problems Xyce has shown scalability
out to hundreds of processes.

Xyce is not SPICE
One of the goals of the Xyce development team has been for Xyce to be
SPICE-compatible.  However, Xyce is not a derivative of SPICE.  It was
designed and written from scratch.

Device Model Support
As a SPICE-compatible tool, Xyce supports a canonical set of compact models,
including the various BSIMs, PSP, VBIC and FBH.  Additionally, a large number
non-traditional models are implemented, which support neuron simulation and
reaction networks.  Behavioral modeling is supported by a powerful expression
library, and Verilog-A models can be incorporated with a model compiler.

Analysis options
As a SPICE-compatible tool, Xyce supports standard analysis methods such as
steady-state(DCOP), transient(TRAN), and small-signal frequency domain (AC).
A number of more exotic analysis methods have also been implemented, including
Harmonic Balance (HB), Multi-Time PDE (MPDE), and model-order reduction
methods (MOR).

Solvers 
Xyce uses the Trilinos solver library, an open-source solver library also
under development at Sandia.  Trilinos is an effort to develop and implement
robust algorithms and enabling technologies using modern object-oriented
software design, while still leveraging the value of established libraries
such as PETSc, Metis/ParMetis, SuperLU, Aztec, the BLAS and LAPACK.  In
addition, a number of circuit-specific solvers have been developed for Xyce,
specifically, including the KLU direct solver.

C++ code design
Similar to Trilinos, Xyce is written in C++, with modular, flexible design as
a goal.  Where appropriate, Xyce applies abstract interfaces to enable easy
development of different analysis types, solvers and models.

Portability
Xyce is supported on Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and OS X, and
on Windows.

Opportunities
The goal of the Xyce development team is to seek new opportunities and solicit
feedback.  Our experience has been that new collaborators, new benchmarks and
external feedback can be a valuable starting point for code improvements.

Open Source
Xyce is available under the open-source license GPL version 3.0.

Download
For more information about Xyce, and to download the code, visit the new Xyce
Home Page at http://xyce.sandia.gov.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated 
by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, 
for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration 
under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.
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-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
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