To boosts performance while ensuring silicon accuracy, Cadence Design Systems, Inc. has implemented advanced "turbo" technologies within the Virtuoso Spectre circuit simulator. This will enable designers to verify their complex large analog designs, such as phase-locked loops (PLLs), analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), transceivers, clock data recovery circuits and power supply circuits much faster without any loss in accuracy, stated Cadence.

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The new Spectre turbo technology addresses a broad variety of challenges across all analog design methodologies and process nodes by delivering a five to 10 times performance gain over existing solutions without any loss in accuracy, asserted Cadence. This speedup enables analog and mixed-signal designers to verify large, complex designs, correlating the results with silicon behavior while meeting aggressive tapeout schedules. The turbo technology also efficiently analyzes 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 industry-leading companies participated in an early access program, giving them a hands-on opportunity to validate the Spectre turbo technology, said Cadence.

"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 Div. LSI Product Technology Unit at Renesas Technology Corp. "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 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 analog designs such as PLLs and ADCs. With the new technology, designers can also take advantage of the latest multi-core processor-based hardware to gain additional speedup using the built-in multi-threaded algorithms. Spectre turbo technology is tightly integrated with the Virtuoso Analog Design Environment and provides out-of-the-box usability with full SPICE accuracy.

"Analog and mixed-signal simulation is a key investment area for Cadence and we are developing advanced core technologies such as the turbo technology to provide leading-edge customers with the highest performance and accuracy for verifying their most complex designs," said Jim Miller, executive vice president, Products and Technologies Organization at Cadence. "With this release, Cadence is further enhancing its holistic approach in the custom IC design market, providing customers with a comprehensive solution for integrated circuit design, verification and implementation."

www.cadence.com