Analysis software speeds WLAN device verification

A Berkeley Design Automation product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Mar 7, 2007

Analog FastSpice enables Atheros' designers to verify their nanometre-scale gigahertz analogue and RF circuits in a fraction of the time required by traditional Spice tools.

Atheros Communications has adopted the Analog FastSpice circuit simulator from Berkeley Design Automation.

Analog FastSpice enables Atheros' designers to verify their nanometre-scale gigahertz analogue and RF circuits in a fraction of the time required by traditional Spice tools.

"The analogue and RF circuits in our Xspan and ROCm chipsets run at a wide range of frequencies from megahertz to multigigahertz", said Srenik Mehta, Director of Analog Design Engineering for Atheros.

"We run extensive performance simulations that require full Spice accuracy and can take days in traditional Spice simulators".

"Analog FastSpice is a great complement to our simulation environment and provides excellent performance improvement in long transient simulations with Spice accuracy in a fraction of the time".

Analog FastSpice uses Berkeley Design Automation's proprietary Precision Circuit Analysis technology to deliver full Spice accuracy, 5x to 10x performance and extremely robust DC convergence compared with traditional Spice tools - all without block-level tuning.

The tool uses the original device equations without any approximations, abstractions, or short cuts, so it delivers identical waveforms as Spice at every node on every run.

It is ideal for simulations that take hours, days, or weeks in traditional Spice simulators.

In addition to leading-edge cellular and WLAN wireless transceivers, Analog FastSpice has been proven on a wide range of production circuits including high-speed I/Os, wireline transceivers, power regulators, sigma-delta ADCs, memory interfaces, and multigigahertz PLLs and DLLs.

"We are extremely pleased that Atheros, a leader in the WLAN industry, has chosen Analog FastSpice", said Ravi Subramanian, President and CEO of Berkeley Design Automation.

"Meeting the stringent requirements of the leading-edge analogue/RF design teams at Atheros is strong validation of our Precision Circuit Analysis technology and the value it can deliver in the design of complex semiconductors for wireless communications".