[mod.vlsi] esim and other simulators

sarmas@TOPAZ.UUCP (E. Sarmas,,,) (03/15/86)

My experience has shown that esim is  a very wierd tool to use if one
wants to simulate large circuits. The problem is that esim does not iterate
the simulation until a new stable state emerges. For example if you have an
inverter whose input is IN and output is OUT and OUT drives other circuits
and say you change IN from 1 to 0 then OUT will go from 0 to 1 but the OUT
line that controls the other circuits will stay at 0 in esim's mind.

This behavior may be right for those who wrote esim because it eases the
simulation process (and the programming) but it is unrealistic and really
breaks down the simulation when Xs start to appear due to classes betwwen
0s and 1s in certain input points where one input is a new value coming out
from the current cycle and another input is the leftover "input-event" that
esim produced in the previous cycle and kept it for the current cycle
instead of iterating it in the previous cycle.

Does anybody know  a way or a hack to force esim to be more realistic ?
I tried  "s" "s" in succession and it did not work (the second "s" gave
"simulation took 0 steps"). Are there are other simulators better than esim or
built on top of esim? Can somebody give a strategy for simulating large
circuits ?

E. Sarmas
topaz!sarmas