Compact Model Coalition

The Compact Model Council is a working group in the Electronic Design Automation industry formed to choose, maintain and promote the use of standard models. Commercial and industrial analog simulators (such as SPICE) need to add device models as technology advances (see Moore's law) and earlier models become inaccurate. Before this group was formed, new transistor models were largely proprietary, which severely limited the choice of simulators that could be used.

New models are submitted to the Council, where their technical merits are discussed, and then potential standard models are voted on. See the article SIMULATION: PSP transistor tapped for standard for an example of this process.

Some of the models supported by the Compact Modeling Council include:

• BSIM3, a MOSFET model from UC Berkeley (see BSIM).
• BSIM4, a more modern MOSFET model, also from UC Berkeley.
• PSP, another MOSFET model. PSP originally stood for Penn State-Philips, but one author moved to ASU, and Philips spun off their semiconductor group as NXP Semiconductors.
• BSIMSOI, a model for silicon on insulator MOSFETs.
• HICUM or HIgh CUrrent Model for bipolar transistors, from CEDIC, Dresden University of Technology, Germany, and UC San Diego, USA.
• MEXTRAM, a compact model for bipolar transistors that aims to support the design of bipolar transistor circuits at high frequencies in Si and SiGe based process technologies. MEXTRAM is developed and supported at Delft University of Technology.

See also

• Electronic circuit simulation
• SPICE