[Gnucap-devel] New gnucap development snapshot

[al davis]

There is a new development snapshot of gnucap available.

There's a package at:
http://www.gnucap.org/devel/gnucap-2007-02-21.tar.gz
http://geda.seul.org/dist/gnucap-2007-02-21.tar.gz

This snapshot improves the plug-in support, adds the ability to 
have commands as plug-ins, and makes almost all of the 
commands, devices, and models plug-in ready.

The Spice wrapper is working, but packaged separately.  There 
are 3 new tarballs available, contaning models:

http://www.gnucap.org/devel/gnucap-2007-02-21-bsim-models.tar.gz
http://www.gnucap.org/devel/gnucap-2007-02-21-ngspice17-models.tar.gz
http://www.gnucap.org/devel/gnucap-2007-02-21-spice3f5-models.tar.gz

or ...

http://geda.seul.org/dist/gnucap-2007-02-21-bsim-models.tar.gz
http://geda.seul.org/dist/gnucap-2007-02-21-ngspice17-models.tar.gz
http://geda.seul.org/dist/gnucap-2007-02-21-spice3f5-models.tar.gz

These model packages are licensed by a Berkeley license, not 
GPL.  See the COPYING file in each package for details.  Since 
they are ports of the work of others, they determine the 
license.  They must be distributed separately because of 
licensing.

The first one "bsim-models" contains the Spice BSIM3, BSIM4, and 
BSIMSOI models, as plug-ins.  It is a complete set, including 
the archival versions and the latest.  The new BSIM460, 
released by Berkeley in December, is included.  There are 28 
models here.

The second one "ngspice17-models" contains the complete set of 
models from ngspice17, as plug-ins.  Not all of them work, due 
to missing support functions in gnucap, but all are included.  
As a reminder, this is a development snapshot.  The 
semiconductor models do work.  The transmission lines probably 
do not work.  The simple devices like resistors and sources 
only work if they use a ".model".  The ones having a plain 
value do not work.  For these, you are better off with the 
gnucap native devices anyway.

The third one "spice3f5-models" contains the complete set of 
models from spice 3f5, as obtained from Berkeley.  Not all of 
them work.  The same points as the ngspice models apply here, 
for the same reasons.

All of these Spice models are supplied without any modifications 
other than a "Makefile" and a configuration file "wrapper.h".

The build and install procedure for the simulator is the same as 
the previous snapshot.  It still has the same link order issue.

Work on Verilog-AMS is going well.  This is part of it.  The 
simulator core will support only the structural subset, which 
lets you make netlists.  Full behavioral modeling with be 
supported using a compiler, similar to the 
existing "gnucap-modelgen".  Eventually, you will be able to 
do "attach my-model.vams", and it will automatically take care 
of the details to make the .so file and attach it.  In the 
future, a working c and c++ compiler, and make will be required 
to fully run gnucap.

As usual, I am asking for feedback, particularly on non-Linux 
and non-GNU systems.