Luminary Micro Adopts Berkeley Design Automation Analog FastSPICE For Full-Circuit Verification
Santa Clara, CA - Berkeley Design Automation, Inc., provider of Precision Circuit Analysis technology for analog and RF integrated circuits (ICs), recently announced that Luminary Micro, a fabless semiconductor company that designs, markets, and sells the award-winning Stellaris family of ARM Cortex-M3 processor-based microcontrollers, has chosen the company's Analog FastSPICE circuit simulator for previously impossible full-circuit verification as well as to verify complex blocks 5x-10x faster – both with full SPICE accuracy.
"We have always wanted to run full-circuit simulation of our microcontroller designs since they contain complex analog components, but traditional SPICE cannot converge on them and traditional fastSPICE tools produce the wrong results," said Tom Hegedus, vice president of engineering for Luminary Micro. "Analog FastSPICE finished what was impossible for every other simulator in just 12 hours. It also slashed our PLL simulations from 24 hours to 2.5 hours while producing identical results. With Analog FastSPICE we can tapeout our chips faster and with significantly more confidence in first pass silicon success."
Analog FastSPICE uses Berkeley Design Automation's proprietary Precision Circuit Analysis technology to deliver full SPICE accuracy, 5X to 10X faster, and with vastly superior DC convergence compared to traditional SPICE tools. By solving the original device equations without any approximations, abstractions, or short cuts, Analog FastSPICE delivers identical waveforms as traditional SPICE simulators at every node on every run. The product is proven on a wide range of circuits including high-speed I/Os, power regulators, LCD-TV source drivers, memory interfaces, and PLLs (phase-locked loops) and DLLs (delay-locked loops).
"We are delighted that Luminary Micro has chosen Analog FastSPICE for their microcontroller verification flow," said Ravi Subramanian, president and CEO of Berkeley Design Automation. "We believe that top-level simulation is a key requirement for nanometer designs and we are proud to enable Luminary Micro to add this capability to their flow, thus improving the effectiveness of their design verification."
SOURCE: Berkeley Design Automation