CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
7 July 2008
Implementation Investments
Renesas Adopts Cadence Virtuoso Spectre Circuit Simulator With Turbo Technology
Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced that Renesas Technology Corporation has adopted the new version of Cadence® Virtuoso® Spectre® Circuit Simulator, with performance-boosting "turbo" technology, for its analog and mixed-signal designs.
Since participating in an early access program, Renesas has realized a significant reduction in simulation run time for pre-layout designs. The Renesas team has seen simulation speed improve up to five times without any sacrifice of full SPICE accuracy.
"We expect to improve design efficiency by adopting the new Cadence simulation technology, Spectre with 'turbo' capability," said Hisaharu Miwa, general manager, Design Technology Division LSI Product Technology Unit at Renesas Technology Corp. "It was easy to use right out of the box, and we have seen around a five times performance gain on our complex power management circuits without any reduction in accuracy. We are convinced we will see a tremendous productivity boost by incorporating this technology into our flow, where Spectre has been used for many years as our standard SPICE simulator for analog designs and cell characterization."
Cadence publicly introduced Virtuoso with turbo technology at CDNLive! EMEA, its user community forum, in Munich, Germany, on April 29. Virtuoso's turbo technology 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.
"Renesas is one of the leading companies in MPU (micro processor unit) development, and we are pleased that turbo capability brings significant performance gain in simulation for Renesas," said Sandy Mehndiratta, group director for the custom IC platform at Cadence. "With the superior performance of our Spectre simulator with turbo technology, we are enabling our customers to more quickly and accurately verify their most complex designs and meet their time-to-market requirements."
The new technology addresses a broad variety of challenges across all analog design methodologies and process nodes by delivering up to 10 times performance gain over existing solutions without any loss in accuracy. 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 20 times performance gains for designs with large amounts of parasitics.
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