Cosmic adopts Cadence Virtuoso Spectre

BANGALORE, USA: Cadence Design Systems (I) Pvt Ltd., a subsidiary of Cadence Design Systems Inc. announced that Cosmic Circuits, a leading provider of analog IP-cores, has experienced up to eight times improvement in performance after adopting the new version of the Cadence Virtuoso Spectre Circuit Simulator, featuring "turbo" technology.

With the increased level of complexity of today’s ICs and the pressure to hit  market windows, accuracy and runtimes are of paramount importance. Cosmic Circuits was looking for a SPICE simulator that would deliver a significant boost in speed without compromising on accuracy. The Spectre simulator, with its recently introduced turbo technology, enabled Cosmic Circuits to improve simulation runtime for design verification—accelerating time to market—with no loss in SPICE accuracy.

“Even in the short time that we have been using the Spectre turbo capability, we have found that the speed advantage it has given us has enabled us to simulate large intellectual property blocks which were not possible earlier,” said C. Srinivasan, vice president of Engineering, Cosmic Circuits. “We now can do high-performance simulation of full 10-bit analog to digital converters (ADC’s), DC-DC converters, and phased locked loops with parasitics in real time to be of great benefit during the design phase. The confidence in the released design is much higher due to the level of verification possible now.”

“We are very pleased to see that Cosmic Circuits has joined the growing ranks of leading companies enjoying the dramatic speed benefits of our Spectre with turbo technology,” said Sandeep Mehndiratta, group director for the custom IC platform at Cadence. “And, as Cosmic Circuits has verified, the improved speed enables in-depth verification, which translates to higher confidence that your chip is bug-free and ready for first-pass silicon.”

The Spectre turbo technology, which includes advanced device model analysis techniques and a built-in multi-threaded algorithm, addresses a broad variety of challenges across all analog design methodologies and process nodes by delivering up to a  10 times performance gain over existing solutions without any loss in accuracy. The turbo technology also efficiently analyzes the potential impact of physical parasitics that can threaten designs in advanced process nodes, delivering up to 20 times performance gains for designs with large amounts of parasitics.

The turbo technology was introduced in April 2008 as a key element of Cadence's advanced node solutions. Virtuoso's turbo technology boosts performance while ensuring silicon accuracy, enabling designers to verify their complex large analog designs, such as phase-locked loops, analog-to-digital converters, transceivers, clock data recovery circuits and power supply circuits.