20 September 2010
Simulation gets x7 speed boost
Responding to ever increasing design complexity, Synopsys has released technology which is said to speed the simulation of complex analogue and mixed signal designs by a factor of seven.
Geoffrey Ying, director of product marketing for the company's mixed signal simulation group, said the solution was a brand new addition to Synopsys' HSPICE simulation suite.
"As designs get more complex, simulations are running longer and more corner cases have to be dealt with. HSPICE Precision Parallel (HPP) speeds the verification of these designs and maintains accuracy."
HSPICE itself has been around for about 30years and is widely used in the characterisation of digital circuits. "We're extending this," said Ying, "to address more complex analogue and mixed signal verification to improve turn round time."
By taking advantage of multicore processors and multithreading techcnology, Synopsys says simulation time for complex designs can be boosted by up to seven times. "We're aiming to bring the simulation times for complex circuits down to less than a day," Ying claimed.
HPP will have the ability to simulate circuits with up to 10million elements. "Some custom designs feature a large number of circuit elements and require a high degree of accuracy, for example sub picosecond timing circuits. HPP lends itself to those circuits," Ying said.
Synopsys says that convergence continues to be improved with this release. "We are seeing more circuits that are difficult to converge," Ying concluded, "but we believe that HPP can converge 99% of them."
HPP will be released in December as part of the HSPICE engine.
Author
Graham Pitcher
Supporting Information
Websites
http://www.synopsys.com
Companies
Synopsys Northern Europe Ltd
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