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Berkeley
Berkeley Design Automation was founded specifically to fill the growing
gap between traditional circuit simulation and silicon for leading-edge
analog and RF designs. The company Precision
Circuit Analysis
technology is the first fundamental breakthrough in analog/RF
verification in more than a decade. The AFS Platform is based on this
technology.
Combining
innovative applied
mathematics with advanced numerical optimization techniques, Berkeley
Design Automation developed the technology from the bottom-up
– never
compromising accuracy. The result is true SPICE accurate transient and
periodic analysis that is 5x-10x faster than SPICE, with no block-level
tuning. Circuit design teams have validated Precision Circuit Analysis
technology versus silicon on hundreds of production designs from
0.5µ
down to 65nm.
True-SPICE Accuracy, 5x-10x Faster,
5x-10x
Higher
Effective Capacity
Precision
Circuit Analysis technology
is based on a proprietary
combination of
innovative applied mathematics and optimized numerical analysis.
Traditional SPICE and RF simulators have mathematical foundations that
go back over 30 years. Their mathematics was practical, if not optimal,
for those circuits. Today’s circuits have radically different
characteristics. Recognizing this, Berkeley Design Automation
identified mathematics proven in non-electronic domains that have
similar characteristics to today’s leading-edge circuits,
e.g.,
multi-rate, nonlinear, and stochastic. Although these techniques showed
great promise, it was not possible to retrofit them into an existing
circuit simulator without losing their accuracy and performance
advantages. Applying them required developing a new simulator from
scratch.
Berkeley
Design Automation turned this apparent disadvantage into an advantage.
The company used the opportunity to apply optimized numerical analysis
techniques to every component in the simulator. Among the new core
components are a fast sparse matrix solver, globally convergent
nonlinear solvers, efficient stiff differential algebraic equation
solver, unified time/frequency engine, and stochastic nonlinear engine.
The development team followed one simple rule – never
compromise
accuracy, and then get as much performance as possible.
Unlike digital
fastSPICE simulators, Precision
Circuit Analysis technology
makes no
simplifying assumptions or approximations. It solves the original
device equations on the original circuit with accuracy that is
equivalent to and or exceeds SPICE simulators. This means that it needs
no block-level tuning and always provides true SPICE accuracy at every
node in the circuit; hence every simulation is a full performance
simulation. The result is breakthrough technology that can address a
whole new class of verification problems.
For
more
information about how Precision
Circuit Analysis tools
compare with
traditional SPICE and digital fastSPICE, see:
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