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Comment by ThJ | Hacker News Reader

i've had a lot trouble with analog simulations in SPICE. they often fail to converge or run incredibly slowly. i do a lot of audio circuitry. the speedups addressed here could potentially make it possible to simulate audio circuits in real time. suppose you feed a signal in via an audio interface, pass it through your analog processing circuitry and play it back in real time. the design cycle would be so much faster.

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We are working on improvements to the baseline simulator also (or rather we basically get them for free because they are part of our core simulation engine), so hopefully that should address some of the first order usability issues in SPICE simulations. For these kinds of design applications, the ML-based speed up may or may not work, since you do have to spend time training the surrogate. You can often re-use pieces of if, but depending on what kind of manipulations you're doing to the model you're surrogatizing, it may or may not help if you're changing the circuit after every simulation.

Sorry if you've already clarified, but is this meant to replace or augment traditional SPICE simulators? I remember Ken Kundert mentioned that, even with the improvements of Spectre over SPICE-based simulators, it took things like SpectreRF's oscillator phase noise modeling to get analog designers to consider changing their ways. Their steadfast use of SPICE is "a form of Stockholm Syndrome," in his own words.

Our plan is to build both some extremely sophisticated analog design tooling that improves the state of the art (by leveraging our existing investments in modeling & simulation from other domains to build a clean simulator implementation) and then have the ML acceleration be an optional "one more thing" that can be used where applicable. Of course the first part is a major undertaking, so we're talking to potential customers to see what particular thing to start with that would really get them to consider using our system. That is independent of the DARPA-funded work though, which is particularly on the ML side (closely aligned of course).

many sims use some variety of SPICE and some convergence algorithm a-la Newton's method to discover the voltages and currents at the nodes. simulating a system where every single component runs in parallel with every other component isn't easy.

speaker frequency response simulations will sometimes use an equivalent electronic circuit. it could help design better speakers. any time you interface digital circuitry with the real world, hybrid circuitry is used. also, with this increased processing capacity, you could be looking at simulating the parasitic properties of components, not just ideal versions of them.

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