Mentor Graphics intros the Eldo Premier simulator

WILSONVILLE, USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. has introduced the Eldo Premier tool, one of the industry’s fastest SPICE simulation solutions.

The Eldo Premier tool offers full SPICE accuracy and up to 20X higher performance and 10X better capacity over traditional SPICE. The Eldo Premier tool targets applications requiring CPU-intensive transient simulations, such as TFT panels, PLLs and DLLs, frequency synthesizers, delta-sigma converters, ADC/DAC audio and video converters, automotive circuits, DC-DC converters, regulators, power management circuits, and memory-critical path analysis.

The Eldo Premier tool accelerates the simulation of large circuits for both pre- and post-layout through the use of proprietary, advanced resolution techniques. The acceleration of single-thread simulation is achieved by applying unique algebraic techniques for the resolution of non-linear differential equations. Multi-threaded simulations accomplish their impressive performance increase through the natively parallel design of the new simulation kernel.

The result for customers is that critically important simulations formerly requiring simulation times measured in days or weeks are now being accomplished in hours and days.

VIA Technologies Inc., a leading fabless supplier of media-rich x86 processor platform silicon for the PC and embedded industries, has already reaped benefits from using Eldo Premier. “In the business of silicon-level innovation, development time is critical,” said Steven Liu, special assistant of the Multimedia and Consumer Electronics Division, VIA Technologies, Inc. “We evaluated Eldo Premier on a 40nm process using a PLL as the evaluation circuit and achieved a 4X speed improvement compared to Eldo Classic.”

“Our customers find that the capabilities of the Eldo Premier tool dramatically increase the productivity of their design team while simultaneously improving quality,” said Robert Hum, vice president and general manager of the Deep Submicron Division of Mentor Graphics. “The Eldo Premier tool’s impressive raw simulation power allows users to run many more corners, and to aggressively attack problem areas such as an entire temperature range or a complete power-supply range instead of just the nominal point of the specifications.”

For users familiar with the Eldo Classic simulator, the Eldo Premier tool offers the same familiar use model. The Eldo Classic tool commands are used to plot and/or probe signals, and the Eldo Premier tool produces the usual output files and post-processing scripts written for the Eldo Classic tool that can be re-used without modification.

The Eldo Premier tool is available today and will also support the Questa ADMS product for mixed-signal verification in the near future including support of VHDL/Verilog and VHDL-AMS/Verilog-AMS descriptions.