ngspice/README.adms

This document is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) v4.0. .

As of Jan. 2023 ADMS is deprectated and replaced by OpenVAF/OSDI.
See README_OSDI.md and README_OSDI_howto.
All references to ADMS will be removed in a future ngspice release.




***************  Verilog A Device models in ngspice ******************************************


1 Introduction

New compact device models today are released as Verilog-A code. Ngspice applies ADMS to
translate the va code into ngspice C syntax. Currently a limited number of Verilog-A models is
supported: HICUM level0 and level2 (HICUM model web page), MEXTRAM (MEXTRAM
model web page), EKV (EKV model web page) and PSP (NXP PSP web site).


2 ADMS

ADMS is a code generator that converts electrical compact device models specified in high-level
description language into ready-to-compile C code for the API of spice simulators. Based on
transformations specified in XML language, ADMS transforms Verilog-AMS code into other
target languages. Here we use it to to translate the va code into ngspice C syntax.
To make use of it, a set of ngspice specific XML files is distributed with ngspice in ngspice\
src\spicelib\devices\adms\admst. Their translation is done by the code generator executable
admsXml (see below).


3 How to integrate a Verilog-A model into ngspice

3.1 How to setup a *.va model for ngspice

Unfortunately most of the above named models’ licenses are not compatible to free software
rules as defined by DFSG. Therefore since ngspice-28 the va model files are no longer part of
the standard ngspice distribution. They may however be downloaded as a tar.gz archive from the
ngspice-30 file distribution folder. After downloading, you may expand the zipped files into
your ngspice top level folder. The models enable dc, ac, and tran simulations. Noise simulation
is not supported.
Other (foreign) va model files will not compile without code tweaking, due to the limited
capabilities of our ADMS installation.


3.2 Adding admsXml to your build environment

The actual admsXml code is maintained by the QUCS project and is available at GitHub.
Information on how to compile and install admsXml for Linux or Cygwin is available on the
GitHub page. For MS Windows users admsXml.exe is available for download from
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mot-adms/. You may copy admsXml.exe to your MSYS2 setup 
into the folder msys64\mingw64\bin, if 64 bit compilation is intended.
More information, though partially outdated, is obtainable from the ngspice web pages 
(http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/admshowto.html) and from README-old.adms.


3.3 Compile ngspice with ADMS

In the top level ngspice folder there are two compile scripts compile_min.sh and compile_linux.sh.
They contain information how to compile ngspice with ADMS. You will have to run autogen.sh
with the adms flag
./autogen.sh --adms
In addition you have to add --enable-adms to the ./configure command. Please check chapter
32.1 of the ngspice manual for perequisites and further details.
Compiling ngspice with ADMS with MS Visual Studio is not supported.