Spice - reload simulation to simulate further

Hi!

My problem is that I have a very large spice circuit to simulate and I have to do this on a remote computer which is not very stable. My simulations takes more then one day, but the remote computer often crash before my simulation is finished (the crashes don't have anything to do with my simulations). My question: Is it possible that I simulate with spice only "a few" timesteps (so the simulation would take i.e. 3 hours), so I can save my results then and start a new simulation which starts at the end of the old simulation?

Until now I only know how to start always from zero on. I don't know how to go on with a former simulation. Any suggestions? (I hope it's not a too stupid question)

Regards, Jan

If the crashes have something to do with memory that has no error checking, and drops a bit now and then, your simulations are probably bad anyway.

Fix the computer.

-Chuck

Can you run the simulation on LTspice? Then you can use a local computer that is stable. LTspice is free and works as well as the expensive Spice engines out there.

-- Mark

Hi!

I can't fix the computer, because it is a server of a company and I don't have admin rights. (And the admins seem to be not able to fix it by themselves)

And I also have to use this spice, because it is a modified spice plus additional components to which I don't have access rights to copy it (and the company don't want to give me a copy) - but I need it for my simulation.

Until now I found out that at least Cadence Spice has a store and restore functionality: Look for "continue/trstore" there:

Also SIMetrix (another Spice Simulator) has something called "Transient restart". Quote: "Transient analysis can be restarted after the stop time has been reached. Useful when a circuit takes longer to settle than originally expected."

But I didn't find anything in spice3 (which is as far as I see the basis of the modified spice of the company)

Regards, Jan

I don't think this is quite what you want... AFAIK, their "transient restart" really just means, "keep simulating for longer... since this whole 'stop time' bit was 100% artificial anyway..." (For a long time they didn't even have a "stop simulation" button on their GUI -- only "pause," because they figured that there wasn't a whole lot of point in "stop and go no further" -- which originally struck me as odd, but these days makes a lot of sense. They added a "stop" button to make people who felt it odd happy, and then took what they always had and made it a feature!)