News and New Products

Become a virtuoso at custom-IC design

By Gabe Moretti -- EDN, 10/16/2003

Cadence’s new Virtuoso platform adds to the capabilities that the Encounter and Incisive platforms provide. The new platform supports custom, analog, RF, and mixed-signal design. With this platform, Cadence is upgrading all of its custom technologies and shipping several new products. The company is also answering in a timely manner those critics who have recently accused it of lagging behind its major competitor in technological innovation. The multimode simulation in the platform provides Spice, FastSpice, AMS, and RF capabilities, all using common syntax, models, and equations, ensuring identical results at the highest accuracy possible within a given simulator. Virtuoso LE Turbo adds design-rule-driven, QuickCell parameterized-cell specification, and wire-to-wire editing capabilities to Virtuoso LE. The platform also adds Virtuoso AMS Silicon Analysis, which is for 130-nm and smaller circuits, and Virtuoso HF-AMS silicon analysis, which includes additional capabilities for circuits that operate at frequencies higher than 1 GHz.

The Virtuoso platform allows designers to select the simulation type at runtime. Cadence has improved the throughput of its layout tools, cutting complex operations by an order of magnitude. Design-rule-driven support ensures correct-by-construction layout. Virtuoso Chip Editor provides full-chip integration for custom, cell-based, and mixed-implementation designs. Designers can use Virtuoso with either the Cadence CDBA proprietary database or OpenAccess. OpenAccess also allows engineers to exchange data between Virtuoso and Encounter platforms.

The Virtuoso platform is available for HP, Sun, IBM, and Linux operating systems. Prices for a one-year license start at $140,000 for Virtuoso Multimode Simulation, $15,000 for Virtuoso Accelerated Layout, and $100,000 for Virtuoso Silicon Analysis.

Cadence, 1-408-943-1234, www.cadence.com.