The starting point for the new offering is FineSim, developed and sold by ACAD before the acquisition. When it introduced FineSim in 2004, ACAD claimed to offer more accuracy than other fast Spice simulators on the market. FineSim was used primarily by flash memory designers, said Andy Huang, ACAD president and CEO and now vice-president of business development at Magma's custom design business unit.

What Magma has added since the ACAD acquisition is a "tri-mode" engine. That means the simulator can run in one of three modes — full Spice, analog, and turbo Spice — allowing designers to pick the best combination of accuracy and speed for any given block. And all three can run at the same time, said Suk Lee, general manager of Magma's custom design business unit.

In Spice mode, the simulator has full Spice accuracy, Lee said. He claimed, however, that FineSim Pro runs three to five times faster than other Spice simulators due to algorithmic improvements. Further, it can be parallelized over multiple CPUs with a near-linear speedup, he said. Lee claimed that Magma has run simulations over 16 CPUs and experienced close to a 16-fold speedup over a single CPU.

The analog mode, Lee said, is comparable to the original FineSim, and is aimed at circuits with hundreds of thousands of transistors. It's much more accurate than existing fast Spice simulators, he claimed. The turbo or "fast Spice" mode claims to run faster than fast Spice simulators without sacrificing any accuracy.

FineSim Pro takes the same models and Spice netlists as other Spice simulators. Output is ASCII or binary, and the FineWave utility provides a waveform display. The simulator also works with third-party waveform tools.

While Magma is integrating ACAD technology "under the hood" in some of its IC implementation products, FineSim Pro is a standalone tool, Lee said. It will ship in August. Lee said pricing will be "comparable" to other fast Spice simulators, but declined to provide details.