Parallel .ALTER Statements in SmartSpice
Parallel .ALTER
The .ALTER statement is designed to allow a SPICE input deck to be re-run with a change in a single parameter. This feature is especially useful in characterization. For this type of work, users will want to run a single deck many times over, changing a single parameter each time. The runs are generally short, taking a few minutes to a few hours to complete. Very often the circuit itself is not so large, but the sequential nature of the analysis means that the characterization takes a long time.
It is increasingly popular to run such simulations on multi-processor machines, with anywhere from two to twelve CPUs, sharing the same memory. A significant speed-up in characterization runs could be achieved if the .ALTERs could be spread over all the CPUs.
