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EDA
Posted on by Daniel Payne

Analog FastSPICE Update at DAC

Analog FastSPICE Update at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 07-01-2014 at 6:57 pm
Categories: EDA

Tuesday night over dinner at DAC I was able to chat with Ravi Subramanian, CEO of Berkeley DA, recently acquired by Mentor Graphics back on March 21st. This acquisition provided Mentor with an Analog FastSPICE circuit simulator to round out its collection of simulators.


Q&A

Q: What kind of customer overlap was there between BDA and Mentor Graphics?

Before the acquisition the overlap was only 2 customers between BDA and Mentor simulators. We’ve been focused on North America customers at BDA, while Mentor had a strong analog IC and some Mixed-signal customers mostly in Europe and Asia.

Really the product liness are complementary.

Q: What is your new position at Mentor?

I’m the GM of a new business unit, with products like : Eldo Classic, Eldo Premier, ADiT, ADMS with Questa, AFS. Paul Estrada is our marketing guy and Amit is the CTO.

Q: In many EDA acquisitions the small company keeps their engineers only, how was this different?

This deal was a very different acquisition model, keeping BDA management into Mentor. We have also kept all the AEs in the field.

Q: How will mixed-signal simulation change at Mentor Graphics now?

There’s a strong history of mixed HDL and transistor-level simulation at Mentor. At BDA we spent more time on use model than development for mixed-signal methodologies. Some design teams have an extensive testbench in SystemVerilog with analog block instances. Others just want to test mixed signal but have very little SystemVerilog. There’s a spectrum of design cases in between those two extremes.

You can kind of divide the world into usage segments like: analog, digital, big A little D, big D big A, etc.

Our customer is thinking about how to solve their mobile phone challenge, or fitbit device. They are looking at the complexity of an AMS design, and the platform leaders.

You can expect to see AFS (Analog FastSPICE) get integrated into Questa ADMS plus some closer connections with Calibre in the extraction flow.

Q: What is your presence at DAC this year?

Our BDA booth at DAC was re-used for all of the new business unit simulators.

Q: Does anything happen with your EDA partner agreements, now that you are part of Mentor?

All agreements with other EDA vendors got carried over, because all of our BDA partners were already part of OpenDoor.

lang: en_US

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