Important changes have been made with the way SIMPLIS is licensed. For users and administrators updating to v6.0 from previous versions, an upgrade and troubleshooting document has been created.

Licensing Options

Portable License

Recommended for individual users or users who wish to share licenses on non-networked machines such as notebook computers.

The license agreement for a portable license allows the software to be installed on any number of user's machines but use of the software is protected with a dongle. Also, a single user wishing to use SIMetrix or SIMetrix/SIMPLIS on multiple non-networked machines will require this type of license.

The dongles we supply are of the USB type and don't suffer from the traditional problems associated with parallel port devices.

Linux Users: Support for USB dongles on Linux systems suffers from some uncertainty as the dongle suppliers only officially support what are now outdated Linux distributions. For this reason we recommend Linux users purchase a network license.

Important: Portable licenses only enable SIMetrix to be run on the primary display on a local machine. You cannot, for example, use SIMetrix from a remote X-server on Linux or from a remote terminal using Windows Terminal Services. If you wish to use this type of configuration, you must purchase a network license.

Local Area Network License

Recommended if SIMetrix or SIMetrix/SIMPLIS is to be shared by more than one network connected user at a local site.

Network licenses are designed for multiple users at the same site who wish to share one or more copies of SIMetrix or SIMetrix/SIMPLIS. The license agreement allows the product to be installed on any number of users' machines but access to the software is controlled by a license manager which we supply. The license manager (FLEXnet publisher from Acresso Software) must be installed on a single machine on your network. Usually it would be installed on a server machine but this is not essential. The license manager runs all the time and controls how many users can run the program simultaneously. So, when a user starts up SIMetrix, the license manager is interrogated to see if there are available licenses. If there are, the program is allowed to run normally. If there are not - because there are others already using the program - the program will still run but the simulator will be disabled.

To comply with the license terms, the user's machines must be located within 400 kilometers / 248 miles of the license server. The wide area license does not have this restriction. See below.

Server requirements: must run 2000/XP/Vista/7 or any Windows server version. Linux (LSB 3.0) is also supported for SIMetrix/SIMPLIS licenses. Other UNIX platforms are not supported.

Wide Area Network License

Same as a local area network license but with no restrictions on the relative locations of the server and client machines.