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Analog/RF
Block Characterization
As
analog and RF circuit designers move to lower process geometries,
rigorous block characterization in the context of realistic physical
effects becomes increasingly important. At 90nm and below, circuit
complexity, circuit nonlinearity, and physical effects—including
process variation, device noise, device mismatch, and detailed
parasitics—make such characterization a growing computational
bottleneck.
The AFS Platform provides a multi-core parallel operating mode that
dramatically speeds analog/RF block characterization on shared-memory
multi-core systems. AFS MCP automatically runs corner, sweep, or Monte
Carlo iterations in parallel on separate cores—each of which runs
5x-10x faster than traditional SPICE. With limited overhead the net
speedup versus traditional SPICE on a single-core machine is ~15x-30x
on 4 cores and ~30x-60x on 8 cores. This speedup is reduced in cases
with significant runtime variance per iteration (e.g., with some RF
analysis sweeps). MCP supports all AFS Platform analyses. Running it
requires simply specifying the desired number cores—the rest of
the inputs and all of the outputs are the same as single-core operation.
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Device
Noise Analysis
Device
noise in analog/RF circuits is critical at 90nm and limits AMS/RF
performance at 45nm and below. Analog/RF designers need to understand
and overcome the increasing negative impact of device noise to
performance, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), bit error rate (BER), and
power requirements in their circuits.
Existing
device noise analysis tools and
behavioral model based approaches are no longer sufficient to
characterize device noise in nanometer CMOS due accuracy, performance,
and capacity limitations.
The Analog
FastSPICE Platform technology
that overcomes the practical
and performance limitations of traditional device noise analysis tools.
The AFS
Platform is the only
device noise analysis
solution that offers nanometer SPICE accuracy.
more...
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