Gemini Unveils SPICE-Accurate Analog Simulation Technology

By DE Editors

Gemini Design Technology, Inc. (Fremont, CA), a startup company focused on the challenges of verifying complex analog and mixed-signal designs, unveiled what it calls the industry’s fastest SPICE-accurate simulation technology specifically developed to leverage the throughput advantages of multi-core computing.

The company’s native multi-threaded technology has demonstrated run times and capacity of up to 30x that of earlier generation analog simulators, and up to 10x improvements over first-generation multi-threaded approaches. The technology has been under development for three years and is being used in several production design environments, as well as benchmarked extensively against state-of-the-art analog simulators, including multi-threaded ones. Combined with low-cost multi-core computing platforms and a unique licensing model, Gemini said it has established a new standard for throughput/cost in a SPICE accurate simulator.

The product is a suitable solution for complex functions such as PLLs, ADCs, and DACs, charge pumps, programmable Tx/Rx chains, power distribution circuitry, and memory IP, particularly where there are a large number of extracted post-layout parasitics that require exhaustive verification prior to tapeout. It runs on standard X86 SMP multi-core platforms equipped with 64bit Linux operating systems.

The Gemini simulation technology was designed to leverage the advantages of multicore platforms, specifically in its architecture and proprietary algorithms, and the implementation of multi-threading model evaluation, matrix solving, and the parallelizing of other computationally important components of the simulator. It is a fully threaded application. Its performance scales roughly linearly with additional cores and its matrix computation time scales roughly linearly with size and complexity of circuit matrices, making it especially effective for large designs with high parasitic count.

For more information, contact Gemini Design Technology, Inc.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.