Cadence Speeds Analog and Mixed-Signal Verification

Venice, Florida — Cadence has introduced acceleration technology in its Virtuoso® Spectre® Circuit Simulator. The turbo technology, as Cadence calls it, boosts performance while ensuring silicon accuracy, enabling designers to verify their complex large analog designs, such as phase-locked loops, analog-to-digital converters, transceivers, clock data recovery circuits and power supply circuits.

The compant claims that the new Spectre "turbo technology" delivers a five to 10 times performance gain over existing solutions without any loss in accuracy. This speedup should enable analog and mixed-signal designers to verify large, complex designs, correlating the results with silicon behavior in a shorter period of time than with the previous version of the simulator. The turbo technology also analyzes the potential impact of physical parasitics, delivering up to 10 to 20 times performance gains for designs with large amounts of parasitics. Several customer companies participated in an early access program, and helped to validate the Spectre turbo technology.

Spectre turbo technology has been extended beyond the core Spectre algorithms to include advanced device model analysis techniques that deliver 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. Virtuoso Spectre Circuit Simulator is part of Virtuoso Multi-Mode Simulation, Cadence's solution for circuit simulation. Spectre turbo technology is available in production as part of the April 2008 Cadence Multi-Mode Simulation 7.0 release.

See also: Cadence Introduces Complete Custom IC Simulation and Verification Solution, and
Cadence Strengthens Custom IC Design Tools