CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
16 January 2007
Implementation Investments
Faraday Adopts Magma's FineSim SPICE Circuit Simulator
Magma® Design Automation Inc . announced that Faraday Technology Corporation , a leading ASIC and silicon IP provider, has selected Magma's FineSim SPICE circuit simulator as the simulator of choice for its high-performance designs after it displayed better accuracy and faster runtime than a number of popular commercial circuit simulation products - cutting simulation time to less than 24 hours on designs that required 26 days to simulate with a widely used competitive simulator.
"We have been using seven different circuit simulators, but we needed a higher-performance transistor-level SPICE circuit simulator for our newest PLL chips, which operate at high frequencies," said Jim Wang, director of Faraday's IRDC (Infrastructure Research Development Center). "By using FineSim SPICE for our 10/100/1000 Ethernet controller, 10/100 fast Ethernet PHY cores, and GHz PLL IPs for UMC's 90-nm processes, we were able to increase the frequency yet maintain low jitter rates. We expect to standardize on FineSim SPICE for much of our circuit simulation."
PLL (Phase-Locked Loop) designs, widely used in consumer electronics applications such as cellular telephones and satellite televisions, require a low jitter rate, the variance between two signals' phases.
"Our goal is to achieve first-cut design success, which ultimately shortens the time to market," Wang said. "FineSim SPICE's accuracy and the fast runtime delivered by its distributed processing helped us complete very advanced designs more quickly - our previous simulator took 26 days, whereas FineSim SPICE took less than 24 hours for the same design."
"Our primary focus is to improve design productivity, and FineSim SPICE is targeted at delivering better accuracy faster," said Suk Lee, general manager of Magma's Custom Design Business Unit. "With FineSim SPICE, designers can simulate very high-performance chips that would have been impractical to simulate with traditional products."
FineSim SPICE is a SPICE-level simulation analysis tool that incorporates transistor-level simulation analysis capabilities for mixed digital and analog designs. FineSim SPICE contains a full SPICE simulation engine with distributed processing that enables customers to simulate large-scale mixed-signal system chips at the transistor level. By providing increased speed and capacity while maintaining full SPICE accuracy, FineSim SPICE enables designers to simulate advanced circuits - such as PLLs, ADCs (analog-to-digital converters), DACs (digital-to-analog converters) and gigahertz SERDES (SERializer/DESerializer) - that they previously would not even attempt using slower traditional SPICE simulators.
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