Date: 25/01/2011

Accelicon's MQA to support Berkeley's analog FastSPICE

Accelicon Technologies is supporting Berkeley Design Automation's Analog FastSPICE Platform in it's Model Quality Assurance (MQA) product.

"Mutual customers have requested support for the Analog FastSPICE Platform in MQA," said Tim K Smith, Accelicon's CEO. "AFS accuracy and performance will maximize productivity of modeling engineers and designers using MQA for SPICE model validation and analysis, while ensuring outstanding correlation to silicon."

Analog FastSPICE (AFS) Platform is the industry's only unified verification platform for nanometer analog, RF, mixed-signal, and custom digital circuits, which combines foundry-certified nm SPICE accuracy, 5x-10x faster single-core performance than any other SPICE circuit simulator, >10M-element capacity, and the industry's only comprehensive silicon-accurate device noise analysis, claims Berkeley. This VLSI verification EDA tool platform supports solving of the original semiconductor device equations and full-circuit matrix without any approximations. Platform includes licenses for AFS Nano SPICE simulation, AFS circuit simulation, AFS Transient Noise Analysis, AFS RF Analysis, and AFS Co-Simulation.

"Accurate SPICE models are critical for IC designers, especially for nanometer high-precision analog, mixed-signal, and RF circuits," said Ravi Subramanian, president and CEO of Berkeley Design Automation. "The combination of our AFS Platform with Accelicon MQA establishes an excellent foundation for ensuring silicon correlation."

Accelicon's Model Quality Assurance (MQA provides a critical link between semiconductor fab and design, comparing, documenting, and validating foundry-supplied models. Differences between technology nodes, library versions, and also other foundry models can be assessed. MBP allows modeling engineer to tweak and optimize SPICE model library in order to best reflect silicon data and meet designer's particular requirement for a specific type of design.

SiPort Inc. is the recent customer of Berkeley's AFS tools used for block-level characterization, top-level verification, and device noise analysis of its nm semiconductor chip design. SiPort is a fabless semiconductor company developing single-chip nm CMOS audio/data broadcast receiver chips.