Panasonic selects Magma’s FineSim SPICE for verification of large analog IP designs

BANGALORE, INDIA: Magma Design Automation Inc. announced that Panasonic Corp., one of the largest providers of consumer electronics products, standardized on Magma’s FineSim SPICE simulator with scalable multi-CPU technology for verification of large analog IP designs.

With FineSim SPICE in the production analog design flow, Panasonic designers have access to fast, accurate, high-capacity SPICE simulation technology that enables them to verify circuit performance of designs that previously were too large and complex to simulate. The ability to accurately predict performance of these large analog designs prior to manufacturing reduces the time and effort required for IC development and fabrication.

“Designing many different types of analog circuits requires very accurate SPICE simulations,” said Dr. Shiro Dosho, senior staff engineer of the Strategic Semiconductor Development Center of Panasonic. “Because of their extremely sensitive nature, verifying complex analog designs typically takes several weeks with SPICE simulators, if they can be simulated at all. With FineSim SPICE, we have seen effective speedup compared with a conventional SPICE simulator, while simulating much larger circuits never before practical in SPICE simulation – and we can verify our designs over multiple conditions.”

“Leveraging Magma’s Native Parallel TechnologyTM FineSim SPICE offers truly scalable multi-CPU performance and capacity while delivering silicon-accurate results,” said Anirudh Devgan, general manager of Magma’s Custom Design Business Unit. “This enables our customers to manufacture their ICs with confidence in meeting expected profit margins. We are pleased that Panasonic is standardizing on our technology for their most challenging consumer ICs.”

FineSim SPICE: Fast and accurate simulation
FineSim SPICE is a SPICE-level simulation analysis tool that incorporates transistor-level simulation analysis capabilities for mixed digital and analog designs.

FineSim SPICE is a full SPICE simulation engine with distributed processing that enables customers to simulate large-scale mixed-signal system chips at the transistor level. By providing increased speed and capacity while maintaining full SPICE accuracy, FineSim SPICE enables designers to simulate advanced circuits -– such as PLLs, ADCs (analog-to-digital converters), DACs (digital-to-analog converters) and gigahertz SERDES (SERializer/DESerializer) -– that they previously would not even attempt using slower traditional SPICE simulators.