Last week Berkeley Design Automation introduced a new Analog Characterization Environment (ACE) – a high-productivity system to ensure analog circuits meet all specifications under all expected operational, environmental, and process conditions prior to tapeout.
While standard cell characterization and memory characterization… Read More
Analog and Mixed-Signal (AMS) designers are facing more challenges than ever, so where can they go to get some relief? One place is a half-day seminar scheduled for May 16th in Bridgewater, New Jersey. SemiWiki has teamed up with Tanner EDA, Abbot Labs and SoftMEMS to present topics of:
Mobile applications require CMOS image sensor devices that have a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), low power, small area, high resolution, high dynamic range, and high frame rate. CMOS image sensor imaging performance is noise limited requiring accurate noise analysis on the pixel array electronics and column readout circuitry.… Read More
At the 2010 DACI moderated a panel session on SPICE and Fast SPICE circuit simulation, and one of the panelists was PierLuigi Dagliofrom STMicroelectronics. To get an update on SPICE circuit simulation at ST I read a PDF document at Mentor titled: Improving the Quality of SPICE Simulation Results with Eldo Premier at ST.
ST does … Read More
Analog, mixed-signal, RF, and custom digital circuitry implemented in GHz nanometer CMOS introduce a new class of design and verification challenges that traditional transistor‑level simulators cannot adequately address. Berkeley Design Automation, Inc., (BDA) was founded in 2003 by Amit Mehrotra and Amit Narayan,… Read More
At DAC in June I first blogged about Symicabecause they offered a Fast SPICE circuit simulator, and today I discovered a free version so I decided to write up a mini-review for you.… 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
Modern SoC (System On Chip) designs contain a larger number of RAM (Random Access Memory) instances, so how do you know what the speed, timing and power are for any instance? There are a couple of approaches:
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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
FineSim is Magma’s circuit simulator that has been doing extraordinarily well. In my opinion it is one of the big reasons that Synopsys is acquiring (presumably, still subject to approval of course) Magma. FineSim is especially strong in the memory market with over 70% of the top 5 DRAM manufacturers and the top 10 flash manufacturers… Read More
