Start Your Engines: AMSD Flex – Your Instant Access to Latest Spectre Features!

Cadence^® Spectre^® AMS Designer is a high-performance mixed-signal simulation system. The ability to use multiple engines, and drive from a variety of platforms enables you to "rev up" your mixed-signal design verification and take the checkered flag in the race to the market. The Start Your Engines blog series will provide you with tips and insights to help you tune up your simulation performance and accelerate down the road to productivity.

 

Bonjour!

Most of you must be reading this blog while working from home. In certain contexts, flexibility could mean opening new doors of possibilities, which in turn allows you to complete your task faster and more conveniently. That is exactly what the flex mode in AMS Designer offers. If you haven't yet read the previous blog post by my colleague Qingyu, please do so as it provides a good introduction to the flex mode. In this blog, I’ll be focusing on the steps that can be used to enable flex mode.

Flex (flexible) mode was introduced by Cadence in AMS Designer back in 2019. This mode gives you the flexibility to run simulations using an independent version of the Spectre simulator with Xcelium Parallel Logic Simulator, instead of the one delivered in the Xcelium installation. This enables you to access the latest Spectre solver as well as Xcelium enhancements.

Enabling AMS Designer Flex Mode in Virtuoso ADE Explorer

To enable the flex mode in Virtuoso Layout Suite ADE Explorer, choose Simulation > Netlist and Run Options to open the Netlist and Run Options form, and select Enable AMSD flexible release matrix.

  Important: Cadence recommends using IC6.1.8 ISR3 or later for the AMS Designer flex mode.

Enabling AMS Designer Flex Mode Using the Command-Line Interface

The -ams_flex xrun option enables the flex mode that lets you use an external Spectre installation. When the flex mode is enabled, AMS Designer will look for the Spectre executable in the Linux user path and use it to simulate the analog kernel. The Linux user path must point to Spectre from the actual installation.

Example command for launching the simulation:

xrun -ams_flex -gui *.sv *.v *.vams amscf.scs …..

Compatibility with Xcelium

AMS Designer flex mode is supported with Xcelium 19.03 S003, SPECTRE 17.1 ISR14, SPECTRE 18.1 ISR6, SPECTRE 19.1 and later versions.

It is recommended that you use a combination of the latest versions available for both the products. For example, XCELIUMMAIN20.03.003 and SPECTRE19.1 ISR5.

Key Benefits

The flex mode provides you the following key benefits:

• Choice of selecting your preferred Spectre solver version
• Reduced turnaround time to integrate newer Spectre technology into AMS Designer
• Ability to upgrade Spectre and Xcelium versions independently
• New generation code for optimized synchronization between both the solvers
• New architecture that allows plugging in the latest version of the solvers, resulting in enhanced performance and fewer issues

• Support for saving the the waveform results in a unified database format (default), which has an analog data container in PSFXL 1.1 format and a digital data container in SST2 format

Note that all the further enhancements for AMS Designer will be made in the flex mode only.

Related Resources

• One-Stop Knowledge Resource for Mixed Signal Verification
• AMS Designer Product Page
• Spectre AMS Designer and Xcelium Simulator Mixed-Signal User Guide

For more information on Cadence circuit design products and services, visit www.cadence.com. 

About Start Your Engines

The Start Your Engines series would bring to you blog posts from several analog/mixed-signal subject matter experts on a variety of topics, such as introduction to the new features in AMS Designer, tips for enhanced working with existing features, and much more. To receive notifications about new blogs in this series, click Subscribe and submit your email ID in the Subscriptions box.

 

Andre Baguenier