DSPF file disregard in extracted simulation

Hi everybody,

I need some guidelines to debug a dspf related issue. The devices in my dspf file created with Calibre xACT are not recognized by spectre. I've done countless parastiic extraction simulation with this workflow and I do not find where things went wrong or what I did differently. I've run successfully extracted simulations with the given dspf file and it was under version control. There was no change in any Cadence environment I am aware of. I have no clue what went wrong.

Issue: There are "element not found" and "node not found. Net is not expanded" errors in the input.spe.spfrpt file. The log pointed me to this file.

ERROR  (STITCH-0040)(:462) :  Element xbufp.xmn0@4 not found.
ERROR  (STITCH-0000)(:164) :  Node vss not found. Net is not expanded
** In NET "tank_n" (:168) ** :

I got no additional info by enabling info and debug in ADE L's Options->Analog forms.

My questions:

1. Is it possible to force spectre to use the dspf file as 'the' netlist. So no backannotation, no stitching, just a simulation with a pure netlist without information about the schematic. (Workaround)
2. How could I debug further what went wrong? How can I check what names does spectre expect? The layout was LVS clean, which is a requirement of a parasitic extraction.

I am using mmsim 19.10.063 on icadv 12.3.

Thanks!
Zoltan

PS:

A slightly related question: Why do I got different printing in the output log when I load the dspf file through ADE L/Simualtion Files/DSPF or with spf="<dspf file>" analysis option?

I have originally included the dspf file through ADE L's Setup/Simulation Files/DSPF section. In the output log it writes the following:

Warning from spectre during circuit read-in.
    WARNING (SFE-2957): No schematic subckt definition is available, spf port order is used.

Later I tried to add the dspf inclusion as an option based on Spectre's User Guide spf="<dspf file path>". In that case a "PARASITIC BACK-ANNOTATION SUMMARY" is shown in the output. Here I see that nodes and instances were not found. My understanding was that the two methods to define a dspf file for stitching is equivalent.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.