cad/irsim 9.7.121 FreeBSD

IRSIM is a tool for simulating digital circuits. It is a "switch-level" simulator; that is, it treats transistors as ideal switches. Extracted capacitance and lumped resistance values are used to make the switch a little bit more realistic than the ideal, using the RC time constants to predict the relative timing of events.

IRSIM shares a history with magic, although it is an independent program. Magic was designed to produce, and IRSIM to read, the ".sim" file format, which is largely unused outside of these two programs. IRSIM was developed at Stanford, while Magic was developed at Berkeley. Parts of Magic were developed especially for use with IRSIM, allowing IRSIM to run a simulation in the "background" (i.e., a forked process communicating through a pipe), while displaying information about the values of signals directly on the VLSI layout.

For "quick" simulations of digital circuits, IRSIM is still quite useful for confirming basic operation of digital circuit layouts. The addition of scheduling commands ("at", "every", "when", and "whenever") put IRSIM into the same class as Verilog simulators.

To run irsim, users should set CAD_HOME to the base installation directory where magic was installed, e.g. /usr/local. Alternatively, the system administrator can create a dummy user named 'cad' with its home directory set to the installation directory.