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Spice simulator offers speed, capacity increase over competitors

Magma Design Automation is again tapping into its recent acquisition of ACAD to add the FineSim Spice analog tool to its largely digital-tool portfolio. Magma offers the stand-alone, Spice-level circuit simulator with a parallel-computing option. Suk Lee, general manager of the custom-design business unit at Magma, claims that the tool offers comparable accuracy with market-leading Spice simulators but is three to five times faster and has larger capacity. “FineSim Spice’s parallel capability allows users to simulate a circuit with much faster linear scalability and handle a larger circuit than was possible before,” says Lee.

The release of FineSim Spice follows the July release of FineSim Pro, a trimode circuit simulator, which has one mode that offers similar capabilities to those of FineSim Spice. “FineSim Pro allows designers to use different modes, depending on their speed-versus-accuracy requirements,” says Lee. FineSim Spice accepts any standard inputs, such as Spice netlists, including back-annotated RLC (resistance/ inductance/capacitance) information in DSPF (detailedstandard- parasitic-format), model-netlist, and stimulus-vector inputs. The tool then generates various Spice-simulationstandard outputs, such as tr0 files and fsdb files for waveform viewers. The analysis results include measured data, timing information, power consumption, and IR-drop-analysis results.

Magma Design Automation, www.magma-da.com.