cadence spectre error (VACOMP-1008)

Debian and Cadence, it never stops. This was another one of those "huh?" errors that showed up after I added a single model. The model has analog VHDL in it. As usual, spectre failures are just symptomatic of some other issue. The first issue was that mpstat was missing, which I fixed with the systat package:

apt-get install systat

The next issue was something different:

/bin/sh: Illegal option -h

The issue here was the /bin/sh is a link to /bin/dash in debian. I changed the link to /bin/bash. Once that was resolved, I then had the next issue related to features.h:

/usr/include/features.h:323:26: fatal error: bits/predefs.h: No such file or directory

I solved this by:

sudo apt-get install libc6-dev-i386

This was followed by the inability to find ctri.o, which is solved by linking:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu /usr/lib64

because LD_LIBRARY_PATH has /usr/lib64 in it.

And suddenly, 14nm is simulating!

Strange Assura error, was not an error at all.

I was having a strange assura error

localhost:~/ic/cadence/ibm7sf> avlck:   ERROR: The command /tools/cadence/assura615oa/share/oa/bin/sysname returned an error status:
                            unknown
avlck: INFO: Note that OpenAccess (OA) requires running the Configure phase.
avlck: See the "OpenAccess Installation and Configuration Guide" before
avlck: you complete the configuration step. This manual is included with
avlck: the Cadence product documentation.

localhost:~/ic/cadence/ibm7sf>  /tools/cadence/assura615oa/share/oa/bin/sysname
linux_rhel40_gcc44x

This doesn't make much sense, and because of how huge Cadence is as a piece of software, it was probably something else. Assura actually runs a file called assura_LVS.run, so I did a chmod +x on it.

localhost:~/ic/cadence/ibm7sf> ./.assura_LVS.run 
/tools/cadence/assura615oa/tools/assura/bin/32bit/assura: error while loading shared libraries: libelf.so.1: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

Ah, it's shared library errors! "ldd /tools/cadence/assura615oa/tools/assura/bin/32bit/assura" will reveal the problems.

lmstat file not found.

I was getting a file not found error from lmstat after a system upgrade. lmstat depends on ld-lsb.so.3, which doesn't exist on my system anymore. I fixed it with a link:

ln -s ld-linux.so.2 ld-lsb.so.3

spectre ERROR (SFE-675)

I had some issues with Spectre after an update. Firstly, I couldn't find libelf.so.1, so I copied it into the mmsim directory library tree. Use "ldd" to figure out what is missing for Spectre. The next issue was a new one for me:

spectre ERROR (SFE-675)

You need to specify the type for "allModels.scs" in the ADS model options. I selected "tt" from the dropdown and it magically started working as magically as it stopped working.

Looking in the allModels.scs, the definition for the modes are given:

***********************************************************************
* "TT" corner : Nominal (default) process and Monte Carlo analyses
* "FFF" functional corner : "Fast" NMOS, "Fast" PMOS
* "SSF" functional corner : "Slow" NMOS, "Slow" PMOS
* "FS" corner : "Fast" NMOS, "Slow" PMOS
* "SF" corner : "Slow" NMOS, "Fast" PMOS
* "FF" corner : "Fast" NMOS, "Fast" PMOS
* "SS" corner : "Slow" NMOS, "Slow" PMOS
***********************************************************************

I was simulating subthreshold, so I've found that TT worked just as well as anything else because the BSIM models this was attached to don't do a good job at surface potential modeling.

virtuoso: command not found.

Cadence switch from ic5141 to ic615hf; however, I'm not on redhat, but debian. That causes some issues. The first issue is

virtuoso: command not found.

apt-get install ksh

The next issue was that I did not have redhat, but you can force things with the environmental variable of

OA_UNSUPPORTED_PLAT linux_rhel40_gcc44x

drush stopped in 10.9

My drush broke. Also, macports seems to have broken their package. The fastest way to install drush on Mac OS 10.9 is via the command line:

sudo php -d detect_unicode=0 /usr/lib/php/install-pear-nozlib.phar
sudo pear channel-discover pear.drush.org
sudo pear install drush/drush

The documentation is at http://pear.drush.org/.

cds_root: command not found.

I changed to a new computer and I had to reinstall my Cadence 5141. I came across something that I didn't expect when I ran icfb:

cds_root: command not found.

This was unexpected. In the dfII/bin/bin64 directory, I also found that there was a cds_root file and that worked fine. After some trial and error, I realized that ic5141 is probably 32-bit.

I have Debian as AMD64, so I had to add the i386 packages for 32-bit support.

dpkg --add-architecture i386

apt-get update

and then you add the libraries.

apt-get install ia32-libs