Chipmunk Updates -- October 1998

• New Bipolar Transistor Models. NPN2 and PNP2 features full Gummel-Poon model and Early Effect (Tim Edwards, Johns Hopkins).
• Port of DEC Alpha/OSF 4.0. Complements existing DEC Alpha/Linux port (Robert Moniot, Fordham).
• Bug fixes. Minor changes to until.

Chipmunk Updates -- March 1997

Improvements and Bug-Fixes

• Support for 16/24-bit displays. TrueColor mode is now supported. Chipmunk programs autoconfigure by default; an environment variable (LOG_COLOR = bw | 8bit | 16bit | 24bit) forces a particular depth (Michael Godfrey, Stanford University).
• New MOS models. New MOS transistor gates. (Michael Godfrey, Stanford University).
• Scope improvements. Edge-triggered scope function now works in Diglog (Bob Moniot, Fordham College at Lincoln Center).
• Lplot Enhancements. New Lplot commands (PSFILE and FILE) allow specification of printer and file names (Tobi Delbruck, Caltech and Tim Edwards, Johns Hopkins). Lplot command HEADER now works correctly (Michael Godfrey, Stanford University).
• TO/FROM Enhancement. TO/FROM gate editing improved (Tim Edwards, Johns Hopkins).
• Bug fixes. Memory leak fixed in digital hierarchial simulation (Olivier Teman, Versailles University); reset operation fixed for several analog gates (Joel White, Tufts University).

Ports (updated platform list)

• Linux/Alpha. New port. (Kazushige Goto, goto@statabo.rim.or.jp)
• MachTen. MachTen port updated (Greg Bond, University of British Columbia)
• OS/2. OS/2 port updated (Michael Godfrey, Stanford University)
• AmigaOS All Chipmunk tools ported to AmigaOS, requires ADE or AmiWin X server. Binary distribution also supported. (Marco Gigante, Pisa University).

Miscellaneous

• New MOS models. Detailed paper [Postscript, 300 KByte compressed] [Adobe PDF, 680 KByte, requires Acroread 3.0] explaining the new MOS models (Michael Godfrey, Stanford University, and John Lazzaro, UCB).
• Xcircuit New supplementary tool for printing schematics (Tim Edwards, Johns Hopkins).

Chipmunk Updates -- May 1996

Improvements and Bug-Fixes

• Diglog schematic corruption bugfix. A major bug that caused Diglog to occasionally core dump on large hierarchial circuits has been fixed; Diglog is safer to use for larger projects. [Ingo Cyliax (Indiana University), Lars Larsson (Hamburg U.), Dave Gillespie]
• Lower load-averages for Log. Log no longer runs a unity load average indiscriminantly. If simulation is turned off, an analog circuit is "incomplete," or a diglog circuit is the null schematic, Log will consume few cycles if the user isn't interacting with the program. [Nick Bailey (U. Leeds, UK), Dave Gillespie]
• Analog gate improvements. Bugs in the NPN1 and PNP1 bipolar transistors were found and fixed [Jamie Honan, Australia] as were bugs in the Diode gate [Shudi Gu, Beijing].
• XNF file support. New tools for supporting Xilinx designs [Ingo Cyliax (Indiana University)].
• Log display support. When launched on a machine with inadequate or unsupported display hardware, Log reverts to monochrome display instead of core-dumping [Huiling, CSU Fresno].

Ports (updated platform list)

• MachTen. Analog now runs under MachTen, a BSD for MacOS. [James Yang, UC Davis]
• Updates for existing platforms. SGI [John Krivitsky, Curtin University of Technology], FreeBSD [Mark N. Martin, Johns Hopkins], and Linux [Luc Claeys, Belgium, Aubrey Jaffer, MIT] had compatibility problems fixed.
• MS-DOS Alpha release available for the MS-DOS port of Log [Luigi Rizzo and collaborators, University of Pisa, Italy].

Documentation

• Diode gate model. New document explaining the diode gate model in analog. [Jamie Honan, Australia]
• Making new Analog gates New document on adding new gates to Analog.

New Chipmunk Features -- February 1995

One major change for 1995 is the conversion of most Chipmunk documentation into HTML, and the integration of these files into a unified system with many cross-links.

Other major changes are ports to new architectures, and updates to existing ports to maintain compatibility with changing operating systems. Here is the list of support changes for this release, along with the contributor(s).

• OS/2. Mike Godfrey of the Information Systems Laboratory at Stanford University ported the Psys and Log packages to OS/2. Other packages remain to be ported, but the Psys port should make these ports much easier to accomplish.
• Sun Solaris 2.X. Reinhard Koehn of TU-Berlin ported Log and Psys packages to Solaris 2.X running under the SPARC processor architecture. The other tools seem to compile well in the Solaris 2.X environment, but I haven't tested them thoroughly. Solaris 1.X (SunOS 4.X) support is unaffected by this port.
• FreeBSD. Dan Andersson of the Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) ported the Chipmunk tools to FreeBSD; John Utz at the University of Washington and Luigi Rizzo at the Universita' di Pisa also contributed to the port.
• SGI. Tor Sverre Lande at IFI in Oslo ported the Chipmunk tools to a SGI Challenger, and Michael Morrison of the University of Iowa ported the tools to an SGI machine running IRIX. I combined these two ports, and tested the result on an Indigo. All the tools seem to work, but I haven't tested them thoroughly.
• IBM RS/6000. Fernando Pineda of the Applied Physics Lab at Johns-Hopkins updated the Chipmunk distribution to compile on more recent OS versions for the IBM RS/6000, building on the earlier port by Gary Liu of Caltech. I tested Fernando's port on a RS/6000 and it seemed to work.
• Linux. Geir Harris Hedemark at IFI at Norway, and Jack Zvonik of TRW in Redondo Beach updated the Linux port to work under more recent Slackware distributions.
• HP 700 Series. All Chipmunk tools now compile with gcc on HP 700 series workstations. It's no longer necessary to use the HP compiler, with the extra-cost ANSI option, in order to run Chipmunk on HP 700 series machines.

In addition to these ports, several new features were added to various Chipmunk tools:

• Postscript updates. All Chipmunk tools now produce encapsulated postscript that is compatible with the psfig macros distributed with TeX. John Platt and Dave Gillespie of Synaptics, Michael Godfrey at ISL, Himanshu R. Pota of ADFA in Australia, and gary@minster.york.ac.uk contributed to these improvements.
• Logspc updates. Harold Levy of Caltech contributed a new version of Logspc, the SPICE netlist tool for Log, that contains new features and bug fixes.
• MATLAB support. Michael Godfrey of ISL contributed a filter program for converting data files produced by Log into files suitable for MATLAB.
• New CIF tools. Several new tools are included for CIF filtering, including Boxify by Tor Sverre Lande.
• Improved documentation. Michael Godfrey of ISL contributed several new Postscript documents for documenting Log, included a detailed explanation of the MOS models currently used in analog.
• Major DigLog bugfix. Micah Beck of the University of Tennessee helped trace down a major bug in DigLog, that was responsible for schematic corruption of large files. Many users were bitten by this bug in the past. Until new users report back, we won't know for sure if this change completely solves schematic corruption for large designs when DigLog simulation is occuring: it's hard to test for bugs that only occur only in large designs.

In addition to these major improvements, lots of little bug fixes and enhancements have been added in the release.

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