System Requirements

In this topic:

Operating System

SIMetrix and SIMetrix/SIMPLIS 64 bit version

The following are supported:

  • Windows 10 Home, Pro and Enterprise - 64 bit editions
  • Windows 8.1, Windows 8.1 Pro, Windows 8.1 Enterprise - 64 bit editions
  • Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise - 64 bit editions
  • Windows 7 Home Premium/Professional/Enterprise/Ultimate - 64 bit editions

SIMetrix and SIMetrix/SIMPLIS 32 bit versions

The following is supported

  • Windows 7 Home Premium/Professional/Enterprise/Ultimate

Windows RT

SIMetrix and SIMetrix/SIMPLIS will not run on any version of Windows RT.

Hardware

SIMetrix will run satisfactorily on any system that meets all the following requirements:

  1. The system is running one of supported operating systems listed above
  2. The system meets the minimum hardware requirement for the operating system
  3. The system's display has a minimum vertical resolution of 720 pixels and a minimum horizontal resolution of 1024 pixels

Recommended System

If you regularly run large circuit simulations or long runs on smaller circuits, we recommend investing in the most powerful CPU available. A large RAM system can be useful as this will allow caching of simulation data. This will speed up plotting results if a large amount of data is generated. The data is stored to disk in an efficient manner and therefore substantial RAM is not essential unless the circuits being simulated are very large indeed. A high performance bus mastering SCSI disk system will improve simulation performance a little.

Multi-core Processors

SIMetrix can exploit multiple core CPUs in a number of ways and will benefit from multiple core processors. Note, however, that you will require a SIMetrix Pro or SIMetrix Elite license to be able to use the multiple core features. Note also that SIMetrix cannot effectively use Hyper-threading.

For more information, see the following sections:

About the 64 bit Version

A 64 bit version of SIMetrix is available for Windows. See above for system requirements.

The bit length of a processor (e.g. 32, 64 etc.) can mean many things but it usually refers to the size of the internal registers and thus the maximum range of addressable memory. Up until recently all personal computers and workstations used 32 bit processors and so the maximum memory range was ???MATH???2^{32}???MATH??? or 4GBytes. This is no longer the unimaginably large amount of memory that it once was. In order to access more memory than this we need more than 32 bits and the usual choice is to increase it to 64.

The memory range is the chief benefit of using a 64 bit processor and you should not expect substantial performance improvements. With SIMetrix, the main area where 4GBytes of memory may not be enough is graph plotting.

Note that all 64 bit applications require a 64 bit operating system as well as a 64 bit processor. You cannot install or run the 64 bit version of SIMetrix on a 32 bit operating system even if the processor is 64bit.

Although major performance benefits should not be expected, a 64 bit application will usually run a little faster with a 64 bit OS compared to a 32 bit version of the same application running with a 64 bit OS.