It’s the second day of DAC, and the announcements are coming in at a fast pace, so stay tuned to SemiWiki for all of the latest details. As a long-time SPICE user and industry follower, I’ve witnessed the progression as EDA vendors have connected their SPICE simulators to digital simulators, opening up a bigger world… Read More
About 35 years ago the first commercial SPICE circuit simulators emerged and they were quickly put to work helping circuit designers predict the timing and power of 6um NMOS designs. Then we had to limit our circuit simulations to just hundreds of transistors and interconnect elements to fit into the RAM and complete simulation… Read More
AMS IC designers have a lot to think about when crafting transistor-level designs to meet specifications and schedules, so the most-used tool in their kit is the trusted SPICE or FastSPICE circuit simulator to help analyze timing, power, sensitivity and even device noise. I just did a Google search for “device noise analysis… Read More
FPGA devices are a great way to drive silicon technology development because they contain both digital and analog IP, along with sophisticated IO cells. The highest performance IOs are transceivers, and Altera has recently designed the Arria 10 device family to include up to 96 transceivers, using a 20nm technology that can achieve… Read More
Berkeley DA coined the phrase “Analog FastSPICE”, and I’ve been getting an update from them at DAC for several years now. In Austin I met with Paul Estradathe COO and Patrick Muyshondt.
Paul Estrada
Paul Estrada, COO (circa 2010)
… Read More
Verification and AMS are top search terms on SemiWiki so clearly designers have a pressing need for fast and accurate verification of today’s mixed-signal SoCs that include massive digital blocks and precision analog/RF circuits. They need simulation performance to verify the mixed-signal functionality, and they need nanometer… Read More
SPICE is an acronym for Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis and represents a class of EDA software used by circuit designers at the transistor-level to predict the timing, frequency, voltage, current or power of an IC or interconnect before fabrication.
In 1971 there was a tool called CANCER (Computer Analysis… Read More
Last year when I visited Tanner EDA at DAC I heard about how they integrated the Analog FastSPICE circuit simulator from Berkeley DA.
This made sense to me because BDA has a good reputation for speeding up SPICE without compromising on accuracy, and Tanner users may want to mix and match tools from multiple EDA vendors.
This year they’ve… Read More
