MuChip adopts Cadence Virtuoso solution

HSINCHU, TAIWAN: Cadence Design Systems Inc. announced that MuChip, a leading fabless RF IC company in Taiwan, has adopted Cadence Virtuoso technology for developing its advanced bluetooth 2.1 RF IC, 2.4GHz ISM band proprietary RF transceiver, Zigbee, WiFi and GPS designs.

MuChip has been developing RF IC for more than eight years, with a commitment to provide its customers with the most sophisticated RF IC design service and unparalled design experiences. MuChip has deployed the Virtuoso-based RF design flow, which provides wireless chip designers access to improved design performance and a more predictable design cycle.

For a recent Bluetooth 2.1 RF IC and 2.4GHz ISM band high data rate RF transceiver tapeout, MuChip relied on the complete Cadence design flow, including Cadence Virtuoso front-to-back products, to quickly and accurately verify, simulate and analyze its RF custom ICs.

To speed custom IC simulation, MuChip used the Virtuoso UltraSim product for full-chip simulation, which provided a six to seven times performance gain over previous project results. The result was a reduction in the MuChip team’s design cycle from weeks to days, while full-chip evaluation was used to minimize errors during chip integration.

MuChip used the XL version of the Cadence Spectre Circuit Simulator to improve numerical analysis, harmonic simulation and speed device model evaluation. Most importantly, the simulation results generated by the Spectre XL product enabled MuChip to achieve functional work with high accuracy in the very first tapeout.

"The Cadence Virtuoso RF solution has improved our ability to implement complex RF designs, ultimately helping us introduce higher quality products to the market faster," said Dennis Cheng, president and CEO of MuChip.

"We are pleased that our joint efforts with MuChip resulted in higher design quality of its RF devices while ensuring high-performance, silicon-accurate simulation and analysis, and faster time-to-market," said Lung Chu, president of Asia Pacific, Cadence. "We look forward to bringing more value-added solutions to MuChip."