Circuit simulator receives upgrade

The Cadence Virtuoso Spectre circuit simulator eases the verification of phase-locked loops, analogue-to-digital convertors, transceivers, clock data recovery circuits and power supply circuits.

Cadence Design Systems has released "turbo" technologies for the Cadence Virtuoso Spectre circuit simulator, the industry's analogue Spice circuit simulator with comprehensive foundry support.

The turbo technology boosts performance while ensuring silicon accuracy, enabling designers to verify their complex, large analogue designs, such as phase-locked loops, analogue-to-digital convertors, transceivers, clock data recovery circuits and power supply circuits.

The new Spectre turbo technology addresses challenges found in all analogue design methodologies and process nodes by delivering a five to 10 times performance gain over existing solutions without any loss in accuracy.

This speedup enables analogue and mixed-signal designers to verify large, complex designs, correlating the results with silicon behaviour while meeting aggressive tapeout schedules.

The turbo technology also efficiently analyses the potential impact of physical parasitics that can threaten designs in advanced process nodes, delivering up to 10 to 20 times performance gains for designs with large amounts of parasitics.

Several companies participated in an early access program, giving them a hands-on opportunity to validate the Spectre turbo technology.

"We found that Spectre turbo technology improved productivity, reducing the simulation run time for pre-layout designs by up to five times without any sacrifice of full Spice accuracy", said Hisaharu Miwa, General Manager, Design Technology LSI Product Technology Unit at Renesas Technology.

"It was simple and straightforward to use, requiring no ramp up time from our engineers".

"Accuracy and high-performance simulation for pre-layout and post-layout circuits are key for us", said Dr Saeed Navid, Vice President at Maxim Integrated Products.

"We are seeing a significant performance boost for multiple circuit types, with full Spice accuracy and without any need to change the simulator settings".

"In post-layout simulation, this new technology has shown to be particularly successful when compared to traditional Spice simulators".

"We look forward to using it in our production flow very soon".

Spectre turbo technology has been extended beyond the core Spectre algorithms to include advanced device model analysis techniques that deliver orders-of-magnitude faster performance for pre-layout and post-layout verification of complex analogue designs such as PLLs and ADCs.

With the new technology, designers can also take advantage of the latest multicore processor-based hardware to gain additional speed using the built-in multithreaded algorithms.

Spectre turbo technology is tightly integrated with the Virtuoso analogue design environment and provides out of the box usability with full Spice accuracy.

Spectre turbo technology is available as part of the April 2008 Cadence multiMode Simulation 7.0 release.

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