Electronic – Which CMOS SPICE model should I choose

cmosdigital-logicmosfetsimulation

I need to simulate digital circuits which have custom gates.

For now I am not concerned about the specific CMOS technology, the transistor Length and Width, etc. I only need to glue NMOS and PMOS transistors together and build some primitive digital components, like inverters, AND and OR gates, etc. and simulate circuits built with those basic components. The reason that I can not use the standard library provided in simulator software such as LTSpice and MultiSim is that I need some special latches and gates (like Muller gate) which is not available in standard CMOS 4000 series so I have to build everything from scratch in transistor level.

Can I just randomly pick a technology like: 0.35u CMOS components

Does the technology really matter?

If not, then what CMOS library models do you suggest for general purpose simulation of digital circuits built with MOSFETs? Is the link to colorado.edu 0.35u CMOS models which I mentioned above good enough?

Best Answer

The technology will determine the following things

  • Speed (smaller is faster)
  • Power consumption (smaller transistors consume less power)
  • Supply voltage (smaller transistors require a lower supply voltage)
  • And of course the required chip area

A 0.35um technology should be OK and you can work with 3.3V. If it is good enough depends on your requirements. In order to determine the speed you can achieve you can wire up a few simple gate structures and make a simulation.

A big advantage of 0.35um CMOS is that this technology is very cheap and protoyping is quite affordable.