Dec 22 2006
Meet SPICE Monkey
I realized that I haven’t introduced SPICE monkey to my readers so now is the time to do so.
SPICE is a circuit simulator developed at Berkeley in the 1970′s. Since then, other circuit simulators have been introduced, most notably Spectre by Cadence Design Systems. However, SPICE is generically understood to be any circuit simulator. If someone tells you to play around with a circuit in a simulator, he will tell you to play with it in SPICE even though he knows that you will be using Spectre.
So what is a SPICE monkey? A SPICE monkey is someone who overly relies on SPICE to design a circuit.
Here’s a conversation I had with a professor:
Professor: Hmm, well it’s nice that you have a gain of 500, but if I were you, I would design for a gain of 600.
Me: Let me just tell you something. I am a SPICE monkey. I don’t do hand calculations. If you tell me to design for a gain of 600 and now I’m at 500, I’m not going to design for it. I’m going to sweep for it.
Over the course of the semester, I had other similar conversations with the professor. It got so bad that at the end of the semester, I was walking down the hallway and I saw the professor talking to a TA…
Professor: Oh look who’s here. It’s SPICE monkey!
Me: Er.
UPDATE: I just realized that since my monkey is a puppet, it naturally has a wazoo.