REVIEW:
What is the intellectual merit of the proposed activity?
This proposal is to develop software to improve the speed and capacity
of the SPICE circuit simulation program. The goal is to rewrite the
equations SPICE solves to separate the circuit physics from computer
implementation, then to apply physical characterizations discovered by
the "founders of modern physics". It is unclear what those
characterizations are; a large part of the proposed work is to reread
old writings by those founders to rediscover their methods, with the
hope that some of those methods would apply to this application.
The scientific justification for the proposal is weak. The archival
search is unlikely to be successful. It requires that that (1) early
physicists, living well before the era of modern computers, would have
written about methods that solve modern problems, (2) that such
methods would remain obscure for 70-odd years, and remain undiscovered
in the intervening time, (3) that the methods would be discovered
during the search, and (4) that the methods would prove superior to
the methods developed in the meantime.
What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity?
The commercial market appears to be large, based on the 61,100
number of hits obtained by a Google search for "SPICE circuit simulation".
A version of SPICE with improved speed and memory usage,
while avoiding compatibility problems, should have a large market.
One caveat, SPICE is designed for analog circuits, not the digital
circuits that form the bulk of the integrated circuit market.
Yet there remain enough analog and mixed analog/digital circuits to
form a large market.
Summary Statement
The weak scientific justification for this proposal is too weak
to merit funding.