SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Armed with a new 3-D field solver that claims unprecedented speed and accuracy, OEA International Inc. this week will announce upgrades to its Cell-An Spice extraction and Net-An net-simulation tools. The company has also extensively revised its Spiral inductor design tool.

Cell-An was introduced last year as a tool that generates Spice subcircuits for IC cells. The latest version includes additional capabilities to define devices, a source-drain resistance solver and Cheetah II, OEA's upgraded 3-D field solver.

Jerry Tallinger, OEA's vice president of marketing and sales, said Cheetah II is about four times faster than its predecessor and is also more accurate, because it uses a higher-density mesh. Cheetah II offers a full 3-D field solution, yet can handle thousand-transistor designs "easily," Tallinger said.

"Traditionally, people have been using formula-based extraction tools," he said. "Formula-based tools lose accuracy as you get to finer technologies. Because of the fringing fields surrounding the inductors, they cannot be accurately modeled using formula methodologies."

So far, however, extremely slow speeds have prevented 3-D field solvers from handling anything more than very small designs. Tallinger said that Cheetah II can solve an "average complexity" cell in a few minutes, and that the time increases linearly, rather than exponentially, as circuit size grows.

Cell-An takes in technology files and GDSII layout files, and produces Spice subcircuits that can run on any simulator. The OEA Post-Layout WorkShop provides a graphical user interface that can create a full-connectivity database. Cell-An is available now on Unix workstations starting at $60,000.

Net-An is a full-chip simulator aimed at critical nets. Net-An release 2.0 uses the new Cheetah II field solver, and exhibits the same performance and accuracy gains as Cell-An. The release also adds a data structure that can handle multinet extraction. As a result, Net-An can now be used for crosstalk analysis, as well as timing and skew analysis.

As input, Net-An uses a three-dimensional geometry model constructed from GDSII data and a process technology file. The model is constructed using the Post Layout WorkShop. Net-An provides extraction of capacitance, resistance and inductance parasitics. Net-An version 2.0 is available now on Unix workstations. It starts at $75,000.

Spiral is a specialized tool for designing the embedded spiral inductors found on high-speed analog and communications chips, hybrids, multichip modules and printed-circuit boards. It uses 2-D and 3-D field solvers to calculate Spice circuits and a proprietary frequency-domain circuit simulator to calculate S and Z parameters.

While the previous version offered only four-sided spirals, Spiral release 2.0 can support any number of sides. Multispiral transformers can now be created and modeled for sensing and filtering circuits. Multilayer spiral configurations are supported.

The spiral winding direction, previously fixed, is now under user control. The product models ground effects or eddy currents in the substrate to improve the accuracy of the S and Z parameters. In addition, multiple spirals can be included in the same simulation, accommodating spiral-to-spiral coupling effects.

Spiral 2.0 is available now on Unix workstations starting at $40,000.