Out in Front: December 7, 1995

With so many mixed analog/digital chips appearing, designers face the problem of achieving simulation capability fast enough for the large-scale digital portions of a design and accurate enough for analog circuitry. Along comes ADM 2.0, a transistor-level simulator based on a proprietary algorithm that boasts an accuracy within 5% of Spice at a simulation speed orders of magnitude faster. According to its developer, Anagram, ADM can simulate 1 million-transistor circuits in less than hour.

ADM lets you input a standard Spice netlist and transistor models and handles approximately 85% of Hspice’s extensions. The tool automatically generates an internal process file based on device models that you input. For digital simulation, you input a standard digital vector file. ADM 2.0 includes a digital circuit evaluator for simulating large digital parts of the design. ADM accurately models second-order transistor-channel and capacitance effects for simulating the dynamic-timing and power characteristics of DRAMs and other memory blocks.

According to Anagram, ADM simulates 100 to 1000 times faster than Spice for large memory and logic circuits and 10 to 100 times faster for analog and mixed-signal circuits. In addition, the simulation algorithm is memory-efficient; you can simulate a 600,000-transistor circuit on a workstation with 256 Mbytes of memory. ADM 2.0 is available now on Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Silicon Graphics, and Sun workstations at prices starting at $55,000. -- by Jim Lipman

Anagram, Sunnyvale, CA. (408) 720-7400.