Today, at CDNLive Silicon Valley, Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence's CEO, announced the Clarity 3D Solver during his keynote. This is the first product in Cadence’s system analysis effort, break-through EM simulation technology that delivers 10X performance and virtually unlimited capacity with gold-standard accuracy.

In this post, I'm going to talk about the cloud, but obviously, the same scalability can be achieved using on-premise datacenters too, although there are often practical challenges with getting dozens of servers when you need them in a datacenter that is heavily loaded. Yesterday, Cadence announced CloudBurst, which supports functional verification, circuit simulation, library characterization, and signoff tools. The list is already obsolete one day later since it supports Clarity too.

3D EM Simulation

Accurate 3D EM simulation is increasingly necessary as data rates increase. For example, last year Cadence announced IP for 112G long-reach SerDes (see my post The World's First Working 7nm 112G Long Reach SerDes Silicon). The IP lives on a 7nm chip, which is a reasonably well-controlled environment. But think what the signal has to go through to actually work. It starts in the on-chip IP, goes through the package, onto a board, through a connector, into a backplane, a second connector, a second board, another package, and into the receiver on a different chip. Surprisingly, we can reduce all of this to a single impulse response to do signal integrity (see my recent posts Signal Integrity for 112G and DesignCon: Cadence Teaches AMI and IBIS) but for that impulse response to be accurate, all of the structures of the packages, PCB traces, connectors, and cables need to be accurately modeled. Connectors, in particular, are highly complex mechanical structures.

Automotive is another area where increased accuracy is important. Modern cars have lots of ECUs (electronic control units), over 100 in some cases. Many of these are relatively low performance—adjusting your seat or turning up the volume on the entertainment system don't require megabits of data or millisecond latency. But the requirements of ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) often do. Cameras, radar, and lidar all produce a lot of data, and automated driving requires low latency. For example, AEB (automatic emergency braking) is a race between applying the brakes and being too late to avoid an accident—at 60mph inches and milliseconds are basically the same. The old automotive buses, such as CANbus, don't have the right characteristics for this, and so increased the automotive version of Ethernet is being used. The data rates are expected to increase, and it is expected that gigabit automotive Ethernet will become standard, running over twisted pair copper. For this to work in the noisy environment of a car, accurate analysis of the harnesses and connectors will be required.

Clarity

For the most extreme cases, such as 112G long reach there is no margin for error and true 3D analysis is required. But 3D modeling tools have not been keeping pace with design team requirements. Designers have been forced to use "pseudo-3D" which only has a chance of being close to accurate in the hands of a true expert. All analysis tools in EDA start off as analysis-only point tools, but what design teams really require is that the analysis is integrated with the implementation. The compute infrastructure has changed in the last year with the availability of Cadence cloud, as opposed to requiring large, dedicated, expensive servers (which somehow never seem to be available when you want them).

Clarity has a next-generation true 3D solution with:

• Gold-standard accuracy
• World-class parallelization technology
• Up to 10X performance increase
• Integration with Cadence tools
• Availability through the CloudBurst platform (see my post yesterday CloudBurst: The Best of Both Worlds)

Analyzing the 112G connector-PCB interface I mentioned above, the analysis is 12.3X faster using hundreds of CPUs, compared to a base case of a traditional solver on 40CPUs. See the graph. Another test case is an automotive DDR4 interface where a 10.4X speedup was attained.

The Clarity 3D solver works with Sigrity signoff analysis to provide signoff for the hardest cases, such as the 112G long-reach interface. Ultimately, the most important thing is whether the analysis matches reality. The eye diagram below shows actual measurements from silicon on the left (pink) compared to using Clarity and Sigrity on the right (light blue). They are indistinguishable.

Teradyne

Or take it from Rick Burns, the VP of engineering for the Semiconductor Test Division of Teradyne:

At gigabit speeds on our highly dense PCBs with over 30 layers, we depend on accurate interconnect extraction of our complex structures to support signal integrity analysis. With the Cadence Clarity 3D Solver, we can achieve the necessary accuracy in a fraction of the time it has previously taken. This has opened up a new era of analysis possibilities for us since we can now run dozens of simulations in the time it has previously taken to run one. This reduces design re-spins and helps us fulfill our promise of delivering the highest throughput and lowest cost of test for our customers.

Learn More

See the Clarity product page.

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