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
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.