Today’s transceivers, I/Os, and consumer products contain ADC and DAC circuits to transform data at analog/digital interfaces. Designers employ a wide variety of circuit techniques including high-speed flash and sigma-delta modulators to achieve the required high resolution, cost, and performance for ADCs and DACs. These circuits pose substantial simulation challenges including performing full-N-bit-word simulations (high-resolution flash) and performing accurate simulations in the face of widely separated sample rates (sigma-delta). These circuits can take from several hours to several days to simulate. The digital portion of the sigma-delta ADC, for example, is large and complex, leading to long simulations to check the signal-noise ratio, settling time, signal amplitude and other characteristics. Because simulation accuracy is critical to ADCs, digital fastSPICE tools are not an option due to their lack of full SPICE accuracy.

Analog FastSPICE delivers waveforms identical to SPICE for every node, but 5X to 10X faster. The tool typically reduces week-long ADC/DAC simulations to a day and overnight simulations to a few hours.

The table below lists customer DAC and ADC circuits for which Analog FastSPICE delivered full SPICE accuracy at least 5X faster.