Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDNS), the leader in global electronic design innovation, today announced the availability of Cadence® Virtuoso® Accelerated Parallel Simulator (APS)
, its next-generation circuit simulator, with the full accuracy of the industry reference Virtuoso Spectre® Circuit Simulator, developed to solve the largest and most complex analog and mixed-signal designs across all process nodes. A key part of the Cadence Multi-Mode Simulation solution (MMSIM) 7.1 release, the new simulator consists of a combination of proven Cadence simulation technologies and a breakthrough parallel circuit solver, along with a newly architected engine that efficiently harnesses the power of multiprocessing computing platforms. The result is a circuit simulator with an accuracy and use model identical to the Virtuoso Spectre Circuit Simulator, delivering significantly improved single-thread performance and scalable multi-thread performance.
The Virtuoso Accelerated Parallel Simulator improves convergence and capacity for designs with hundreds of thousands of transistors, reducing design and verification time in most cases from weeks to hours.
"We are pleased to find a next-generation simulator on the market that can keep pace with our performance requirements for top-level simulation of custom digital and analog designs, such as a DC-DC converter," said Helmut Schweiss, director of new business start-ups at ON Semiconductor. "The Virtuoso Accelerated Parallel Simulator delivered a 20.6 times performance boost over traditional SPICE simulators, which enabled us to verify and detect multiple design issues, and meet our critical tapeout deadline. This would not have been possible otherwise, and eliminated unwanted surprises during our silicon verification."
The Virtuoso Accelerated Parallel Simulator addresses performance and capacity challenges that occur when designing and verifying large tightly coupled and post layout analog and mixed-signal blocks and subsystems, where solving the circuit structure is a bottleneck in simulation. The new simulator delivers exceptional performance, and is significantly faster than the traditional SPICE circuit simulators for pre and post-layout analog blocks and mixed-signal designs. This greatly improves IC designers’ productivity by completing most simulation tasks within the same work day and enables verification tasks that would otherwise be impractical, leading to greater confidence in first-pass silicon success.
The Virtuoso Accelerated Parallel Simulator has been extensively tested with hundreds of customer designs and validated by more than 20 industry-leading customers on performance, capacity, and most importantly accuracy against the industry’s standard, Virtuoso Spectre Circuit Simulator. These customers have tested the new simulator on almost every type of analog and mixed-signal design, including Phase Locked Loops, Data Converters, Memory IPs, Power management circuits and several full-chip designs prior to tapeout. The Virtuoso Accelerated Parallel Simulator, combined with a modern multiprocessing computing platform and MMSIM’s flexible token-based licensing model, delivers a powerful and cost-effective circuit simulator with significant focus on complex analog designs and mixed-signal IC verification.
"Productivity boost in our verification flow is a critical requirement and we are very encouraged to see a next-generation SPICE simulator on the market that can handle large, complex designs we are creating," said Raed Moughabghab, director of the Mixed Signal Design Group at Entropic Communications. "We validated Virtuoso Accelerated Parallel Simulator on our existing design and realized a 2.5 times performance over Spectre with turbo, and 12.5 times performance over Spectre with a four-core compute platform, and plan to use it on the next design project."
The new simulator is compatible with existing Cadence simulation technologies, enabling customers to preserve investments made with Virtuoso custom IC platform without adoption barriers.
"Over the past eight months, we have introduced several compelling new simulation technologies," said Zhihong Liu, corporate vice president of research and development for circuit simulation and physical verification products at Cadence. "In April we brought a significant performance boost to the Virtuoso Spectre Circuit Simulator with our ‘turbo’ capability, and two months later we brought the turbo power to our RF simulation technology. The Virtuoso Accelerated Parallel Simulator is a significant addition to our Virtuoso Multi-Mode Simulation technology, serving as the simulation platform for a cost-effective, scalable and reliable solution for teams whose large, complex analog designs pose some of today’s greatest design challenges and verification bottleneck."
Cadence enables global electronic design innovation and plays an essential role in the creation of today's integrated circuits and electronics. Customers use Cadence software and hardware, methodologies, and services to design and verify advanced semiconductors, consumer electronics, networking and telecommunications equipment, and computer systems. The company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., with sales offices, design centers, and research facilities around the world to serve the global electronics industry. More information about the company, its products, and services is available at www.cadence.com