ADMS

Automatic Device Model Synthesizer (ADMS) is public domain software used in the semiconductor industry to translate Verilog-A models into C-models which can be directly read by a number of SPICE simulators, including Spectre Circuit Simulator, Ngspice, and HSpice.


Overview

ADMS stands for Automatic Device Model Synthesizer. ADMS can be used to turn Verilog-A compact models into C code. ADMS interpreter parses a Verilog-AMS file to build a data tree. XML filters are applied on the tree to generate the output files.

ADMS aims to reduce the effort of circuit simulator developers to integrate device models - at the same time, it provides the option to compact model developers to use the vendor-neutral language Verilog-A for model definition, improving robustness and maintainability.

ADMS is used by the open source SPICE simulator NGSPICE to support a number of compact models. Following models are supported by NGSPICE using ADMS:

The upstream version of the original ADMS project hasn't been updated since version 2.3.0. The Qucs project has created a fork of ADMS that is still being used as code generator to generate models of compact devices written in Verilog-AMS into source code for the SPICE simulator. The maintained fork only supports a subset of Verilog-AMS language.

ADMS is still part of electronic-circuit simulation software. According to the documents of the ngspice project, ADMS is used to convert Verilog-AMS compact models to C for integration with ngspice.

Limitations

ADMS only parses a subset of Verilog-A, and not all statements are supported by all XML filters. Specifically, current controlled voltage sources are not supported in most filters targeting SPICE simulators:

Instead, this needs to be represented as a conductance expression (and not impedance).
i.e. I(..) <+ V(..)

Some other language constructions need to be supported in the filter as well

Many language features are hard to support with ADMS filters

Important aspects of code generation are close to impossible with ADMS

and

See also

References

  1. ↑ Sergey Sukharev (24 March 2006). "New enhancements in ADMS and Spectre CMI XML scripts" (PDF). mos-ak.org. Retrieved 9 April 2023.
  2. ↑ Transistor model#Models for circuit design .28compact models.29
  3. ↑ "Tutorial". Archived from the original on 28 September 2013. Retrieved 9 January 2014.
  4. ↑ "Compact device modeling using Verilog-AMS and ADMS" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 27 April 2015.
  5. ↑ "Ngspice circuit simulator - adms".
  6. ↑ "Ngspice circuit simulator - adms and ngspice HOWTO". ngspice.sourceforge.io. Retrieved 9 April 2023.
  7. ↑ "ADMS - An automatic device model synthesizer". GitHub. Qucs. Retrieved 22 September 2026.
  8. ↑ "README.adms". GitHub. ngspice. Retrieved 22 September 2026.