Nov 14 2012
Berkeley Design Automation, Inc., provider of the world’s fastest nanometer circuit verification, today announced the availability of Analog FastSPICE™ AMS (AFS AMS) which delivers the industry’s simplest, fastest, most-accurate verification of today’s complex nanometer-scale mixed-signal circuits. AFS AMS combines the award winning, foundry certified Analog FastSPICE circuit simulator with any leading Verilog® hardware description language (HDL) simulator to provide full Verilog-AMS language support.
The semiconductor industry has an unmet and rapidly growing requirement for fast nanometer SPICE accurate mixed-signal verification that is practical for everyday use. Traditional co-simulation approaches have accuracy, performance, capacity, and functionality limitations that make them impractical to verify mixed-signal designs that combine massive digital logic and high-performance analog circuitry. The leading AMS simulator translates all analog circuitry to a Verilog-AMS representation that analog designers did not create and do not recognize. The result is a difficult-to-debug verification flow.
Analog FastSPICE AMS delivers fast mixed-signal verification with nanometer SPICE accuracy that is straightforward to set-up and easy to run. Design teams using AFS AMS are productive in hours rather than weeks. The tool’s powerful configuration support enables arbitrarily nesting of Verilog-AMS, Verilog-D, Verilog-A, and leading SPICE netlist formats—all of which it runs without translation. AFS AMS combines the world’s fastest, most accurate circuit simulator—Analog FastSPICE—with any leading signoff Verilog HDL simulator to run the digital logic. The result is superior accuracy, performance, and capacity that are practical for everyday use.
“At Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited, we design very complex nanometer mixed-signal SoCs that include processor cores, logic, and high-performance mixed-signal circuitry. We are standardizing on AFS AMS for mixed-signal verification of our complex nanometer-scale ICs,” said Masaru Ito, Director Mixed-Signal and Analog Design Methodology Development Department, Technology Development Division, Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited. “AFS AMS is easy to setup for our analog and digital designers, making it practical to use everyday. It delivers the standard Analog FastSPICE nanometer SPICE accuracy and is more than 10x faster than our previous AMS simulator. With AFS AMS we can verify our complex mixed-signal designs much more thoroughly and accurately.”
AFS AMS is ideal for design teams that have been using limited co-simulation flows, difficult AMS flows, or avoiding mixed-signal simulation altogether because of its complexity. Analog designers are able to continue working within their normal environment—either the industry-leading analog design environment or the command line. They simply specify their desired configuration and use their original netlist. Likewise digital designers simply specify their desired configuration and work with their original source in their normal environment with their standard testbench, digital simulator, models, debugging tools, etc.
“Many of our over 100 customers require improvements to their mixed-signal verification flow,” said Ravi Subramanian, president and CEO of Berkeley Design Automation. “With AFS AMS, we are proud to deliver another key capability to the AFS Platform that enables our customers to access the industry’s fastest nanometer SPICE-accurate mixed-signal verification capability in a simple and compelling use-model that will enable them to deliver superior products to market significantly faster.”
The Analog FastSPICE Platform provides the world’s fastest circuit verification for nanometer analog, RF, mixed-signal, and custom digital circuits. Foundry certified to 20nm, the AFS Platform delivers nanometer SPICE accuracy 5x-10x faster on a single core and >2x faster on multicore systems versus any other simulator. For circuit characterization, the AFS Platform includes the industry’s only comprehensive silicon-accurate device noise analysis and delivers near-linear performance scaling with the number of cores. For large circuits, it delivers >10M-element capacity, the fastest near-SPICE-accurate simulation, and the fastest, most accurate mixed-signal simulation. Available licenses include AFS circuit simulation, AFS Transient Noise Analysis, AFS RF Analysis, AFS AMS, and AFS Nano SPICE.