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Design and Development Hardware
News Release from: Xoomsys | Subject: Distributed processing in circuit simulation
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 24 May 2005
Distributed processing speeds circuit
simulation
Xoomsys reckons it has made significant progress towards increasing circuit simulation throughput using industry-standard simulators.
Xoomsys, a Silicon Valley company focused on enabling large-scale circuit simulation, has announced significant progress towards increasing circuit simulation throughput using industry-standard simulators Initial tests on customer-specified circuits have demonstrated that Xoomsys' distributed processing technology delivers 15-20 times higher throughput on a 10-processor Linux cluster
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 16 Jan 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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This speedup allows IC designers to perform transistor level simulation of large circuits, such as fully extracted clock subsystems, power grids, PLLs, and other circuits that are difficult to simulate, and where simulation accuracy is mandatory.
"Ensuring correct functionality of sub-100nm designs in the presence of effects such as coupling, noise and IR drop often requires accurate simulation at the transistor level", said Jim Hogan, an EDA industry visionary and General Partner at Telos Ventures.
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"A high-capacity transistor-level simulation capability that does not compromise accuracy is ideal for addressing these requirements".
"Xoomsys is on the right track in developing such a capability", he added.
Xoomsys' breakthrough technology enables partitioning of large tightly coupled circuits and the distribution of the resulting partitions for simulation as effectively decoupled problems on multiple independent processors.
As a result, dramatic speedup in simulation throughput, which scales up with the number of processors, is achieved.
The Xoomsys solution uses industry-standard circuit simulators and low-cost Linux-based computers to offer a cost-effective way to speed up simulations.
In using the Xoomsys solution no changes are needed to the existing designs, design flows, tools, or methodologies.
Xoomsys has been working with the leading circuit simulator vendors to speed up existing customer simulation flows.
"Cadence has two strong circuit simulation products in Virtuoso Spectre circuit simulator and Virtuoso UltraSim full-chip simulator", said Dr Zhihong Liu, Vice President of Simulation Engineering for Cadence Design Systems' Custom IC Division.
"We expect that our customers will soon be able to address a completely new class of simulation problems by utilising the accuracy of Virtuoso Spectre and the speed of Virtuoso UltraSim with the Xoomsys solution".
"The ability to accurately simulate large transistor-level circuits is a critical step in our design flow since it eliminates the need to break up a design into smaller pieces for simulation", said Sury Matury, Director of the Design Automation Technology Group at National Semiconductor.
"This minimises interface errors and allows for more exhaustive verification before committing the design to silicon".
"Consequently we would have more robust and manufacturable designs".
"We have harnessed the power of distributed processing for speeding up circuit simulation", said Anjaneya Thakar, President and CEO of Xoomsys.
"The ability to use distributed processing in circuit simulation has been a challenge for the industry for many years".
"Xoomsys has solved this difficult problem, bringing significant benefits to IC designers".
Xoomsys will show its test results in private sessions at the 42nd Design Automation Conference in Anaheim, California, from 13th to 17th June 12005 on Booth 1280, and will engage in a limited beta-testing programme with selected customers later that month.
Production release for the product is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2005.
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