Fifty Years of SPICE

Abstract: Exactly fifty years ago. Professor Donald O. Pederson and I presented a paper entitled "Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE)" at the IEEE 16th Midwest Symposium on Circuit Theory, as this conference was called then. This was the first paper on SPICE to be presented in public, although we had been working on SPICE at the University of California, Berkeley since 1971 and SPICE itself evolved from the CANCER class project taught by Professor Ronald A. Rohrer in the 1969-1970 school year at the University of California, Berkeley. Engineers entering the integrated circuit industry today weren’t even born when I released the first version of SPICE, but a vast majority of engineers have to learn SPICE to earn their degree! In this talk, I will chart the journey of SPICE, starting as a teaching program at the University of California, Berkeley, and spreading into industry and launching a cottage industry of software houses writing and supporting “alphabet SPICE.” I also give credit to the early principals in this journey, and share some amusing experiences. No one can say for sure, but I will speculate on how this particular program has evolved and yet stayed pretty much the same for more than fifty years. I can think of no other computer program that can make that claim. Biography: Laurence W. Nagel is an independent consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has worked in the integrated circuit industry for more than 50 years. While earning his BS, MS, and PhD degrees at the University of California, he developed the SPICE circuit simulation program which launched a cottage industry of SPICE simulation tools. Mr. Nagel then began a 20 year career at Bell Laboratories which included developing the ADVICE circuit simulation program; participating in the development of the Kull-Nagel bipolar model; designing analog circuits for submicron NMOS processes; working in the AT&T Intellectual Property Division on assertion of patents and negotiation of patent licenses; and serving as project manager in the development of the Celerity circuit simulation program. Mr. Nagel then joined Anadigics, Inc., where he managed simulation of RF integrated circuits; modeling and characterization of GaAs MESFET device processes; and importing silicon CMOS design tools and foundry support. In 1998, Mr. Nagel founded his own company, Omega Enterprises, to consult on analog circuit design, circuit simulation, semiconductor device modeling, and as an expert witness in patent litigation and trade secret misappropriation matters. In 2008, he returned to his native California where he now resides with his wife Jean in Kensington and operates his consulting company Omega Enterprises Consulting.