CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

22 August 2008

Implementation Investments

BitWave Semiconductor Selects Berkeley Design Automation Analog FastSPICE™ and Noise Analysis Option™ for Programmable CMOS RF Transceiver Verification

Berkeley Design Automation Inc. announced that BitWave Semiconductor, Inc., a fabless semiconductor company and innovator of programmable radio frequency integrated circuits (RFIC), has selected the company's Analog FastSPICE™ circuit simulator and Noise Analysis Option™ device noise analyzer for verification and noise analysis of their programmable CMOS RF transceiver.

"Verifying our programmable CMOS RF transceivers requires full-circuit simulation and transistor-level noise analysis,” said Geoff Dawe, CTO at BitWave. “We selected Analog FastSPICE for our next-generation products after verifying its true SPICE accuracy and performance on our current products. We also chose the Noise Analysis Option so we could perform transistor-level device noise analysis on our complex analog/RF circuits including ADCs, mixers, and PLLs."

Berkeley Design Automation tools include Analog FastSPICE™ circuit simulation, Noise Analysis Option™ device noise analyzer, RF FastSPICE™ periodic analyzer, and PLL Noise Analyzer™. The company guarantees true SPICE accuracy, defined as identical waveforms to the leading "golden" SPICE simulators down to noise floor (typically 0.1% or less) while delivering 5x-10x higher performance and 5x-10x higher capacity. It achieves this by using advanced algorithms and numerical analysis techniques to rapidly solve the full-circuit matrix and the original device equations without any shortcuts that could compromise accuracy.

Design teams from top-10 semiconductor companies to leading startups use Berkeley Design Automation tools to solve big analog/RF verification problems. Typical applications include characterizing complex blocks (e.g., PLLs, ADCs, DC:DC converters, PHYs, Tx/Rx chains) and running performance simulation of full circuits (e.g., wireless transceivers, wireline transceivers, high-speed I/O macros, memories, microcontrollers, data converters, and power converters).

"We are excited that BitWave Semiconductor has selected Analog FastSPICE and Noise Analysis Option for their programmable CMOS RF transceiver," said Ravi Subramanian, president and CEO of Berkeley Design Automation. "Delivering high performance, low-power multi-standard programmable RF transceivers is a tremendous challenge. BitWave's selection of Berkeley Design Automation tools further validates the strong competitive advantage our Precision Circuit Analysis technology provides to leading-edge designers of highly-integrated analog/ RF transceivers."

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