Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced the new Cadence® Spectre® FX Simulator, a next-generation FastSPICE circuit simulator that enables the efficient verification of memory and large-scale system-on-chip (SoC) designs. As part of the industry-leading Spectre simulation platform, the Spectre FX Simulator’s innovative and scalable FastSPICE architecture offers customers up to 3X better performance compared to the latest FastSPICE simulators with equal or better accuracy. With the addition of the Spectre FX Simulator, the Spectre platform offers the industry's only complete simulation solution providing a seamless accuracy-performance continuum for all applications from cell characterization through chip-level verification.
Today's complex memory and SoC designs need high accuracy and fast simulation performance to ensure they function as intended and meet chip specifications. Additionally, it's increasingly essential to include post-layout parasitics in the chip verification process, especially for advanced-node designs to account for the layout effects on the chip functionality. Innovative engineering went into the new FastSPICE solver development to provide breakthrough levels of performance and accuracy within the Spectre FX Simulator. The new simulator gives design and verification teams the ability to accurately check timing, functionality and power consumption of their full-chip and subsystem-level designs. In addition to the productivity gains achieved through improved performance with accuracy, the new Spectre FX simulator offers several other benefits:
- Scalability: The simulator offers scalability of up to 32 cores with multi-threading to parallelize transient simulations to take advantage of hardware resources and improve productivity.
- Best-in-Class Use Model: The Spectre FX Simulator delivers the industry's most intuitive use model with the best out-of-the-box accuracy and performance balance and a minimal amount of tuning needed to obtain the optimal accuracy and simulation speed for any given verification task.
- Ease of Adoption: The simulator fully leverages the Spectre platform's infrastructure technology, including seamless integration into the Virtuoso®ADE Product Suite, providing easy adoption into existing Spectre and SPICE flows.
- Comprehensive Analyses and Verification Capabilities: The Spectre FX Simulator offers extensive verification capabilities, including static and dynamic circuit checking, alters, sweeps and Monte Carlo analyses, allowing designers to expand the scope of their verification beyond functionality, timing and power checks.
"At MediaTek, we need a highly accurate, scalable, and fast top-level verification solution for our advanced-node high-speed SoC designs," said Ching San Wu, Corporate Vice President at MediaTek. "Using the new Cadence Spectre FX Simulator, we accelerated FastSPICE verification by 3X, leveraging its performance, ease of use, and multi-core capabilities. By deploying the Spectre FX Simulator, we can leverage the full Cadence Spectre platform as a one-stop-shop solution for all our SoC simulation needs."
“Renesas’ flash memory IP verification flow must verify functionality, timing and power in various operating modes efficiently and accurately, while also taking into consideration parasitic layout effects,” said Mr. Nobuhiko Goto, Director, Design Automation Department, Shared R&D EDA Division at Renesas. “The new Spectre FX Simulator fits seamlessly into our IP verification flow and is on track to delivering 2X increase in productivity with its intuitive use model and the need for very little tuning.”
"The Cadence Spectre Platform has been the leading analog simulation solution for more than 25 years, consistently providing our customers with proven accuracy and performance benefits," said Tom Beckley, senior vice president and general manager of the Custom IC & PCB Group at Cadence. "With the new Spectre FX Simulator, we are completing the Spectre portfolio and bringing customers a highly accurate and fast simulation solution. The Spectre FX Simulator allows customers to accelerate SoC design verification, enabling them to meet aggressive time-to-market goals."
The new Spectre FX Simulator further builds upon Spectre industry leadership and supports the Cadence Intelligent System Design™ strategy, enabling design excellence.
