CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

16 September 2008

Implementation Investments

Fresco Microchip Selects Berkeley Design Automation Analog FastSPICE™ and Noise Analysis Option™ for Single-Chip Broadcast TV Receiver

Berkeley Design Automation Inc. announced that Fresco Microchip Inc., a developer of digital/analog broadcast TV receivers has adopted the company's Analog FastSPICE™ circuit simulator and Noise Analysis Option™ device noise analyzer for verification of their nanometer-scale ICs .

 "At Fresco we pride ourselves on being able to deliver high performance, superior quality products to our customers whom are addressing the growing analog-digital broadcast market," said Dr. Stephen Jantzi, director of Analog/RF Design at Fresco Microchip. "Our low-power, single-chip TV receivers require extensive complex-block characterization, full-circuit performance simulation and transistor-level noise analysis. Traditional and accelerated SPICE tools do not have the capacity, performance, and accuracy for our complex circuits. With Analog FastSPICE, we are characterizing our complex analog/RF circuits 5x-12x faster than traditional SPICE with true SPICE accuracy and are able to simulate top-level circuits. We use the Noise Analysis Option on our sigma-delta ADC, and its results correlate very well with silicon measurements."

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 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).

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