Berkeley Design Automation and Tanner EDA accelerate circuit cerification for A/MS designers

DAC 2011, MONROVIA & SANTA CLARA, USA: Tanner EDA, the catalyst for innovation for the design, layout, and verification of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits (ICs), and Berkeley Design Automation Inc., the nanometer circuit verification leader, are collaborating to integrate Tanner EDA’s HiPer Silicon design suite with the Berkeley Design Automation Analog FastSPICE Platform.

Analog, mixed-signal, and RF designers have increasing requirements for circuit simulation performance and capacity with nanometer SPICE accuracy. The seamless integration of the Analog FastSPICE Platform into the HiPer Silicon full-flow design suite delivers nanometer SPICE accuracy 5x-10x faster than traditional single-core traditional SPICE simulators.

With this integration, Tanner EDA users can verify the most challenging analog/RF circuits and with the most advanced nanometer CMOS technologies. Tanner EDA will be demonstrating the integrated flow at the 48th Design Automation Conference (DAC) in the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California, from June 6-8, 2011.

The Berkeley Design Automation Analog FastSPICE Platform is the industry’s only unified verification platform for nanometer analog, RF, mixed-signal, and custom digital circuits. The AFS Platform combines foundry-certified nm SPICE accuracy, 5x-10x faster single-core performance than any other SPICE circuit simulator, >10M-element capacity, and the industry’s only comprehensive silicon-accurate device noise analysis.

The AFS Platform is a single executable that uses advanced algorithms and numerical analysis to rapidly solve the original device equations and full-circuit matrix without any approximations. It includes licenses for AFS Nano SPICE simulation, AFS circuit simulation, AFS Transient Noise Analysis, AFS RF Analysis, and AFS Co-Simulation.

The HiPer Silicon full-flow design suite from Tanner EDA gives designers a complete analog design flow from schematic capture, circuit simulation, and waveform probing to physical layout and verification. HiPer Silicon v15 , release in April 2010, included:

* A complete redesign of the waveform editor product (W-Edit), which provides designers with a signal analysis platform rather than simple layout views.
* The addition of a new database for storage and management of simulation data.
* HiPerDevGen, the newest addition to Tanner’s tool portfolio that offers breakthrough device and structure generation for layout productivity.

“The combination of the AFS Platform with Tanner's HiPer Silicon design suite brings great benefit to our mutual customers,” said Ravi Subramanian, president and CEO of Berkeley Design Automation. “Analog/RF designers using Tanner's Design tools with the AFS Platform will be able to verify very complex analog/RF circuits with nanometer SPICE accurate results.”

“Tanner EDA is dedicated to providing our analog, custom, and mixed-signal design customers with the best possible price for performance, and excellent interoperability,” said Mass Sivilotti, chief scientist for Tanner EDA. “Integration with Berkeley’s analog FastSPICE platform continues to give our customers the widest possible choice of leading-edge technology. More advanced integration, which we will be discussing at DAC, is planned.”

Tanner EDA will be demonstrating in Booth # 2231 at DAC 2011.