Magma's FineSim SPICE chosen by TLi as standard for verification of large analog IP designs

SAN JOSE, USA: Magma Design Automation Inc., a provider of chip design software, announced that Technology Leaders & Innovators (TLi), a global provider of consumer electronics products, has standardized on FineSim(tm) SPICE for verification of large analog IP designs.

TLi selected the Magma software after results of an exhaustive evaluation of a number of commercially available SPICE simulation products showed that FineSim SPICE, with its scalable multi-CPU capabilities, delivered runtime that was an order of magnitude faster than traditional multi-threaded simulators.

"We design many different types of analog circuits, including PLLs, ADC/DACs and high speed I/Os, that require extremely precise simulation during the design phase," said Soon-Won Hong, vice president at TLi.

"Through our evaluation, we found that FineSim SPICE provides 10 times faster simulation on a single CPU than other solutions, while meeting our accuracy requirements. Even more impressive was the scalable multi-CPU capability: we achieved better than 10 times faster simulation than conventional multi-threaded SPICE simulators. This dramatic speedup enables us to verify very large, post-layout, top-level netlists in SPICE, improving accuracy and allowing us to design and tape out with much more confidence in achieving first-pass silicon success."

"Enabled by Magma's Native Parallel Technology, FineSim SPICE offers significantly higher capacity and truly scalable multi-CPU performance while delivering silicon-accurate results," said Anirudh Devgan, general manager of Magma's Custom Design Business Unit. "By ensuring first-time right silicon on large designs, FineSim SPICE helps customers like TLi reduce design and manufacturing costs and increase profit margins."

FineSim SPICE: Simulating advanced circuits
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, DACs and gigahertz SERDES (SERializers/DESerializers) -- that they previously would not even attempt using slower traditional SPICE simulators.