Nanosim with Synthesized Verilog

Apr 11, 2006 1 Replies

Hello,



I have a question about Nanosim from Synopsys. I'm in a team that does an ASIC design - we use the IBM Cu-11 library. I want to use Nanosim to estimate the power of my design (I can provide input vectors etc to Nanosim). Is this possible at all?



First of all, I tried to provide the synthesized verilog (structural verilog) files as an input to Nanosim. But, I kept getting these errors:



Netlist compilation took 0.350 s nanosim: ERROR: illegal # of elements (0) in netlist



Second, I tried synthesizing the same behavioral verilog files and used dc_shell to write the output in the EDIF format. I fed this input to Nanosim and it was able to accept the design. But, the *.edif file had references to the standard cells from the IBM library and Nanosim complained that it could NOT find the subcircuit definition or the functional model of these cells.



I do have the functional model files for the IBM Cu-11 library (in terms of the *.v files) and the *.db and *.lib files. I'm not sure how to feed these to Nanosim. I tried the cell_lib_path option in the config file and also, -L flag. Both don't seem to work. Does anyone how to get this setup to work? Do I need the Cu-11 library files in a different format? How do I indicate to Nanosim about these library files?



Or am I in a wrong domain and should probably be looking at PrimePower or a similar tool?



I'd be very grateful if someone answers the above questions.



Thanks in advance, G.Sibi



Hi Sibi,

I am more of an HSIM user than a nanosim user, so I may be leading you astray. Both HSIM and Nanosim are fast-spice tools. My suspicion is that it is expecting the spice models for the standard cells, and the verilog/edif is used to describe the connections to complete the matrix. Instead of giving the tool the standard cells as *.v files, see if you have spice files available.

Good Luck.

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