Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Cadence Design Systems | Subject: Virtuoso custom design platform
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 12 September 2006
Platform promises faster route to custom
SoCs
Custom design platform for advanced analogue, mixed-signal, RF and custom digital design addresses challenges across a wide range of process nodes and design styles.
Cadence Design Systems has introduced its new Virtuoso custom design platform for advanced analogue, mixed-signal, RF and custom digital design The platform provides design teams with integrated technologies that address challenges across a wide range of process nodes and design styles, including traditional analogue, SiP, mixed-signal, RF SoC and digital cell characterisation, from 180 to 45nm
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 19 Sep 2003 at 8.00am (UK)
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Design platform maintains nanometre-scale accuracy
The Virtuoso custom design platform is claimed to be the world's first comprehensive platform for fast, silicon-accurate custom, analogue, RF and mixed-signal design.
Chip integration solution speeds custom design
Cadence Design Systems has optimised its Virtuoso custom design platform with the availability of a new chip integration flow, coupled with the newest release of its Virtuoso Chip Editor.
The growth of personal consumer electronics and wireless products has tremendously increased the custom, analogue, mixed-signal, and RF content in devices and the design complexity at a time when expert resources are in short supply.
Building on Cadence's leadership in this area, the new Virtuoso platform features an integrated design environment, modern capabilities for constraint management as well as new technologies for verification, floorplanning and routing.
With the new Virtuoso platform, customers may improve productivity with an accelerated overall IC design flow; increase design accuracy with minimised respins; and deliver differentiated, high-quality, custom silicon which meets demanding time to market schedules.
Further reading
Enhanced platform accelerates custom IC design
Improvements to the Virtuoso custom design platform bring significantly greater speed and productivity to analogue, custom and RF design.
Suite makes IC designs more manufacturable
The Cadence Virtuoso Resolution Enhancement Technology (RET) Suite integrates lithography awareness directly into the Cadence Virtuoso custom design platform.
Specification-driven design works for Zarlink
Zarlink Semiconductor has used the Cadence Virtuoso custom design platform to successfully verify its ultra-low-power communications chips.
The new Virtuoso platform was beta-tested with a number of semiconductor and fabless design companies, including Avago Technologies, Infineon Technologies, National Semiconductor Corporation, PMC-Sierra, Qualcomm and Renesas Technology.
The Virtuoso platform improves design efficiency and designer productivity by dramatically shortening the learning curve for the adoption of new solutions and enhancing the ease of use during IC development.
The unique integrated design environment, which uses a common cockpit, allows designers to draw on the broad array of design solutions needed to address growing challenges in analogue, mixed-signal and RF design.
"Our customers are requiring increased design efficiency and effectiveness to handle the advanced challenges of today's complex analogue, mixed-signal and RF designs", said Marco Racanelli, Vice President of Technology and Engineering at Jazz Semiconductor.
"We have collaborated with Cadence to deliver a process design kit (PDK) for the new Virtuoso platform for our latest 0.13-micron process which, together with our silicon-accurate models, will provide our common customers the new capabilities needed to realise full design potential and quick time to market".
The Virtuoso platform introduces an automated constraint-driven methodology to custom design, helping design teams maintain design intent throughout the entire design flow.
The platform automates the communication and application of complex design constraints from specification through layout to verification.
In addition, the Virtuoso platform is built on OpenAccess.
The use of this common database allows design teams to use more sophisticated, multi-company design chains that combine the Virtuoso platform with the Cadence Encounter digital IC design and Incisive functional verification platforms to design highly complex mixed-signal designs, regardless of the ratio of analogue to digital circuitry, or with the Cadence Allegro system interconnect design platform to address emerging SiP design challenges at 65nm.
This helps improve interoperability across multiple solutions, integrate design solutions and flows, and reduce design support costs.
"The new Virtuoso platform enables designers to tackle the most complex analogue and RF design requirements emerging from the telecommunications and consumer markets", said Charlie Giorgetti, Corporate Vice President, Product Marketing, at Cadence.
"The Virtuoso platform is a classic example of the depth that Cadence solutions exhibit - it delivers everything from specification to layout to verification, driven with an integrated constraint-driven methodology that connects the electrical and physical design domains together for the first time".
"Our customers stand to benefit with faster design time, reduced errors and increased predictability and opportunity for first-pass design success".
To better meet diverse customer needs for design software, the Virtuoso platform is available in tiered configurations, Virtuoso L, XL, and GXL, which provide multiple levels of technology tailored to specific levels of design complexity.
The new Virtuoso platform will be shown at the CDNLive! Silicon Valley technical conference, scheduled for 12th to 15th September 2006, in San Jose, California.
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