CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
16 June 2008
Implementation Investments
Cadence Virtuoso Spectre With Turbo Technology Adopted by National Semiconductor
Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced that National Semiconductor, a leader in energy-efficient analog integrated circuits, has adopted the new version of the Cadence® Virtuoso® Spectre® Circuit Simulator, featuring "turbo" technology for advanced performance with no degradation in SPICE accuracy.
With the increase of complexity that accompanies ever-growing analog and mixed-signal ICs, transistor-level verification is a growing bottleneck in the overall custom IC development process. National is addressing this problem by using the Spectre simulator to verify its large, complex production analog ICs. The Spectre simulator, with its recently announced turbo technology, enables National to improve simulation runtime for design verification—accelerating time to market—with no loss in SPICE accuracy.
"The new turbo technology in the Spectre simulator has reduced the simulation runtime of our complex analog circuits — such as ADCs and high speed PLLs - up to six times over traditional SPICE simulators—and without any loss of accuracy," said Sury Maturi, director for National Semiconductor's Design Automation Group. "We are integrating this new turbo technology into National's design environment and plan on deploying it to all our design centers worldwide where Spectre has been used in our production flow for many years as our standard SPICE simulator."
The Spectre turbo technology, which includes advanced device model analysis techniques and a built-in multi-threaded algorithm, 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. 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.
"We are pleased that National Semiconductor is taking advantage of the advanced performance benefits of the turbo technology we've brought to our Virtuoso Spectre simulator," said Sandeep Mehndiratta, product marketing director at Cadence. "We're continuing to improve performance to address our customers' analog simulation requirements for their challenging complex analog designs, enabling them to ensure silicon success and meet their time-to-market goals."
The turbo technology was introduced in April as a key element of Cadence's advanced node solutions. The Virtuoso Spectre Circuit Simulator provides fast, accurate SPICE-level simulation for tough analog and mixed-signal circuits. A part of Virtuoso Multi-Mode Simulation, it is tightly integrated with the Virtuoso platform and provides detailed transistor-level analysis in multiple domains. Its superior architecture also allows for low memory consumption and high-capacity analysis.
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