History of HSPICE

[Joel Kolstad]

I had reason to dig up some information on the history of SPICE, and among
other things learned that HSPICE is really Hailey-SPICE, from Shawn and Kim
Hailey, who are twins and who started Meta software. This is a long -- but
interesting -- interview with them:
http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/hailey.htm

What they don't mention in there is that, yeah, "their own" SPICE ran at
6x-10x the speed of "regular" SPICE, but they started by taking the Berkeley
SPICE 2E source code and adding some rather obvious vector optimizations
based on the fact that they were running their program on a time-shared
Cray, which could perform vector operations in hardware. Still, that was
during the "wild wild west" stages of Silicon Valley, and it's quite
impressive.

---Joel

 

[Robert]

I had reason to dig up some information on the history of SPICE, and among
other things learned that HSPICE is really Hailey-SPICE, from Shawn and Kim
Hailey, who are twins and who started Meta software. This is a long -- but
interesting -- interview with them:
http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/hailey.htm

What they don't mention in there is that, yeah, "their own" SPICE ran at
6x-10x the speed of "regular" SPICE, but they started by taking the
Berkeley SPICE 2E source code and adding some rather obvious vector
optimizations based on the fact that they were running their program on a
time-shared Cray, which could perform vector operations in hardware.
Still, that was during the "wild wild west" stages of Silicon Valley, and
it's quite impressive.

---Joel

Thanks.

Robert