[Gnucap-devel] New gnucap development snapshot

[al davis]

There is a new development snapshot of gnucap available.

Changes:

1. Autoconf based build system.  (Thanks: Dan McMahill).
The old build system is still available, by 
running "configure.old".

2. Changes to the transient analysis step control algorithm.  
The truncation error based control mode is very accurate now.  
It also uses the concept of an "ambiguous event", which is an 
event that is scheduled at an approximate time than can be 
moved.  It also tries a little harder to keep the time step 
consistent.  Some of the default options have been changed.

3. Changes to the switch model.  It now assumes that there is a 
small delay after crossing a threshold before switching occurs.  
It is possible to bound this delay, so timing accuracy is 
significantly improved compared to the old algorithm.  It also 
eliminates switch convergence problems in transient analysis.



Issues still outstanding to be addressed before an official 
release:

1. BSIM3 charge effects.  Part of it is turned off because it 
causes convergence problems.  It is probably a simple error.  
Since the current state is an improvement over the last 
snapshot, and this is a development snapshot, I decided to 
release anyway.  This issue applies to BSIM1 and BSIM2 also.

2. Autoconf based build system.   It is there, but there are 
known bugs in it.

3. The manual does not include changes since 0.34, the last 
official release.

4. The step control algorithm sometimes misses on the second 
time step, due to a lack of information.  If this is a problem, 
set the option "trstepgrow" to 2, which will apply the same 
hack that was done previously, at the expense of slower run 
time later.


You can get it at: 
Official site:
http://www.gnucap.org/devel/gnucap-2006-06-28.tar.gz
Mirrors:
http://www.geda.seul.org/dist/gnucap-2006-06-28.tar.gz