( SNUG 03 Item 22 ) ---------------------------------------------- [05/14/03]
Subject: NanoSim, Nassda HSIM, Avanti HSPICE, Cadence Spectre, Mentor Eldo
YIN & YANG: The other place where Cadence is facing serious competition is
in SPICE. This time, Gary's numbers show it, too.
Dataquest FY 2001 SPICE Market (in $ Millions)
Synopsys/Avanti HSPICE ########### $22.5 (38%)
Nassda HSIM ########## $20.7 (35%)
Cadence ###### $11.2 (19%)
others ## $4.7 (8%)
But Cadence's Spectre is still the 800 lbs gorilla in the analog simulation
market, though.
Dataquest FY 2001 Analog Simulation Market (in $ Millions)
Cadence Spectre ##################### $41.7 (80%)
Avanti Analogy Saber #### $8.6 (16%)
Mentor Anacad Eldo # $2.1 (4%)
NanoSim is Synopsys' new answer to Nassda's HSPICE. From the user comments,
it doesn't look like Nassda is going to be disappearing any time soon.
"Cadence's Analog Artist is SUCKY, and it lies. What's new?"
- Bob Pease of National Semiconductor
"Nassda HSIM is best vs. NanoSim. Avanti HSPICE is still the best vs.
Cadence Spectre or Eldo. EPIC should be abandoned. No experience
with Cosmos."
- Tie Li of Applause Technolgy
"Nassda's HSIM rocks. It's Avanti HSPICE compatible. We use both with
very little manipulation. Our HSPICE netlist reads straight into HSIM.
We use HSPICE for the every day simulation, HSIM for the full
chip/memory simulations. It is a nice fit.
Eldo is a joke. No experience on Spectre. NanoSim is awkward to use."
- Dave La Rosa of Microchip Technology
"NanoSim is an evolution of the old Epic tools with a nice interface to
the digital simulators. NanoSim will be merged with StarSim-XT (HSPICE
on steroids) to provide the accuracy, speed, and efficiency of HSPICE
with the nice NanoSim interface (at least that is the marketing plan!).
If they pull it through, it should be an awesome product.
No experience with Cadence. Limited use of Eldo. HSPICE rules.
Foundry models are easy to get.
Cosmos is just a joke. This is so that Avanti can claim 'one stop
shopping'. Cadence Analog Artist rules! It is truly integrated and
very mature. Cosmos is still under development and has not gained
any momentum."
- Roberto Landrau of Mitre
"12:00 - 12:45 - Top-Down Design of a Mixed-Signal Power Converter IC
How to use Saber in designing this IC. They use Mentor Modelsim as
Verilog simulator, and Synopsys Saber for analog. They used heavily
some capabilities of Saber to modify parameters of their analog
testbench during run time.
Q. How is the digital/analog teams methodology? Do they all use this
one?
A. They have independent methodologies
Q. What's the main issue you run into with this integration
verification methodology?
A. Suprisingly very few issues. Probably the main one was setting up
the hypermodels."
- Santiago Fernandez-Gomez of Pixim, Inc.
"Avanti HSPICE is the tool of choice here with some Celerity thrown in."
- Bob Lawrence of Agere Systems
"I do occasionally use Avanti HSPICE. I know one of our suppliers uses
Eldo, but I don't know the basis for their selection, and I've never
compared the two. I haven't used any of the other tools."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Anyway, our group performs heavy-duty transient analysis in the course
of our design. To improve our design cycle, I worked on an analog
circuit simulator eval in the second half of 2002. We compared
Cadence Spectre, Mentor Eldo, and Avanti HSPICE. Spectre's showing was
so poor, it did not warrant first-class treatment in our final customer
presentation:
Circuit Type MOSFETs HSPICE Eldo
--------------------- ------- ------ -----
Charge Pump 1 k 1x 0.4x
Full chip sim 25 k 1x 0.4x
Full chip sim 25 k 1x 3.6x
Full chip behavioral 20 k 1x 4.1x
Sensing 3 k 1x 2.5x
ADC 1 k 1x 2.6x
Full chip performance 70 k 1x 3.0x
Setup and Hold 5 k 1x 1.3x
Eldo averaged 2.2x and was typically 3x faster than HSPICE."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Celestry seems to have a slight advantage. For SPICE it's the same
thing, where Spectre is the prefered simulator.
Cosmos versus Virtuoso: Cosmos needs a few more years. It's still
the kid brother."
- Bengt-Erik Embretsen of Zarlink Semiconductor
"Cadence Celestry is a smart delay calculator. The advantage of
Celestry is that this tool recognizes the mesh structure for clocks in
which there are parallel buffers. PrimeTime delay calculator does not
recognize the parallel buffers therefore the relevant interconnect
delay are zero. Same things occur in the Cadence Celtic IC which also
does not recognize the parallel buffer structure therefore puts out
zero interconnect delay. Designers can be easily fooled by the result
from PrimeTime and Celtic IC.
Since 0.18 um technology, a lot of the antenna violations are fixed by
inserting antenna cells in the P&R phase. Because the antenna cell
timing libraries (.db and .lib) are not furnished by library provider
(ex. Artisan), it can be easily overlooked during delay calculation.
The PrimeTime delay calculator will report zero interconnect delay if
that particular wire has antenna cells connected to it. Designers can
be easily fooled by the result. On the other hand, if the antenna
cell's .lib is missing then the Cadence Celestry will report a huge
delay on that particular net with antenna fixes. At least, the tool
provides an alarm system."
- Hui-Hwa Chiang of Cirrus
"Forget about Mach-TA and Celestry. We think Nassda HSIM is better than
Synopsys NanoSim, expecially if you have real analog parts in the
design. In Philips we use Spectre from Cadence simply because our
transistor models are only supported on this one. I believe that all
the *mill tools are outdated, since most of the EPIC development
team have left Synopsys to go to create Nassda. (Perhaps I am wrong
here.) We have not used Powermill for a long time now and indeed have
dropped our license for cost reduction !!!"
- Philippe Duquennois of Philips
"Nassda HSIM is fast, and worked on our design. NanoSim didn't. I like
HSPICE's price, Spectre's convergence, and Eldo's usability. We
currently use Avanti HSPICE.
We use Analog Artist, but Cosmos looks good. I really like Aptivia,
the recent purchase of Antrim by Cadence. It's a very good analog sim
cockpit. It removes the need for 90% of the scripts designers used to
write for Analog Artist."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Avanti HSPICE is the standard. Why change a good thing?"
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"NanoSim again has the advantage of direct integration with VCS to make
mixed-signal sim faster and easier. Nassda HSIM is not bad technology,
but Synopsys again has better business model."
- Wilson Chan of Qualcomm
"I think the only real players are Synopsys and Nassda. I would probably
give the edge to Synopsys between the two only because we have more
experience there and we already have/use other Synopsys tools in the
flow so we are better integrated, but beyond that you could probably
flip a coin.
In the device level simulation space, the players are Avanti HSPICE and
Cadence Spectre. For our world, Spectre is used heavily because of
better integration with the Cadence environment that we use for layout
and schematic capture. HSPICE is widely used in the industry so we need
to maintain support for it. I think both are fairly interchangeable.
As far as Eldo is concerned, I think the only people who use it (and
like it) are 'Europe first' types."
- Terry Lowe of IBM Microelectronics
"Avanti HSPICE gives a very mature and well documented appearence. The
same goes for Cadence Spectre except the documentation. Perhaps I
simply missed the right documentations in the tons of Cadence binaries?"
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"NanoSim has evolved pretty heavily since I used it in its past life as
Timemill. There have been many improvements such as the direct model
calibration, interface to VCS for full mixed mode sims, the user GUI,
Verilog-A support, and improved algorithms. Their Verilog-A seems to
have still quite a few incompatibilities with other tools that I have
used and am currently using. Overall it has been a very reliable tool.
MachTA is kind of in a neck to neck race w/ NanoSim and has additional
support for VHDL mixed mode as well as full donut hole partitioning.
They have a pretty advanced GUI as well, but it has always taken me
much longer to get up and running with MachTA on a big job, as well as
tuning settings for accuracy to produce results similar to a SPICE
engine. It is a very capable simulator as well, but the initial setup
can be a bear.
As far as speed, they both do very well on full digital circuits but
with analog circuitry including current sources and diff pairs, both
are not that much faster than a Spectre or HSPICE."
- Milam Paraschou of Micron
"I have only used NanoSim and Mentor MachTA. MachTA has gotten better
but I still think that NanoSim seems more polished. As a circuit
designer, I usually need more accuracy than speed and NanoSim has a
way of designating accuracy but still speeds up the other parts of
top level simulations that makes it very useful. Avanti HSPICE and
Cadence Spectre seem to have similar accuracy and usually have results
that correspond well. Spectre has issues with accepting other inputs
like SPICE netlists. Mentor Eldo does not correspond as well and is
not used as much because of accuracy questions.
The Synopsys EPIC RailMill tool is hard to run. It needs an expert
user to get any results that are useful. Cadence Analog Artist does
not seem to be easy to script for repeatable characterizations. I have
never used Avanti Cosmos."
- Amanda Reddy of Micron
"I am using AstroRail for power analysis purposes. The results are
questionable, minor changes in input parameters, changes the results
in a very unexpected way. We don't trust the results of the tool.
No support for the AstroRail in Israel - remote support is very hard
to relay on (due to time differences).
Tool not debugged - we discovered many bugs that made the impression
that no sufficient QA was made for the tool before releasing versions.
Long simulation durations (more than one day), large memory consumption
(more than 21 Gig for some cases)."
- Efrat Ilia of Intel
"We did evaluate AstroRail with success. We managed to correlate
simulations with power measurements taken from production silicon.
As a result we gained enough confidence to alter our power routing on
future projects to be less conservative and saved 10% die size. We
also used statisical power estimates and again this correlated with
expected data reasonably well. If nothing else AstroRail provides a
great way of ensuring you routed the power network correctly."
- Craig Farnsworth of Cogency Semiconductors
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