Start Your Engines: AMSD Flex—Take your Pick!

16 Apr 2020 • 2 minute read

Video

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.

In the first post of the Start Your Engines blog series, I wish to introduce you to a more efficient version of AMS Designer!

Background...

The classic mode of AMS Designer comes with a specific Spectre engine integrated with the Xcelium digital engine so that both the engines can run together to solve a mixed-signal circuit design. While the classic integration provided synchronized communication between the two engines resulting in high efficiency and performance, there was still some scope of improvement in this architecture, in terms of cutting down the delay in accessing enhancements in the Spectre engine for a certain version of Xcelium. When new features and enhancements were delivered into Spectre, the designers would need to upgrade both Spectre and Xcelium in order to access them. Upgrading the digital engine version solely to match the analog engine upgrade was a challenge to the design house tool management.

Introducing AMSD Flex Mode

For the benefit of our AMSD users, in Xcelium 20.03, the AMSD flex mode has been introduced. With this mode, you get the flexibility to choose the version of Spectre for a particular Xcelium release. You no longer have to wait for the hard-coded integration done at the software level. The flex mode provides you quick access to new features and enhancements (or even fixes) of Spectre.

Figure 1: Concept of AMS Flex Mode

The idea of the new architecture is to create a standardized interface for the connection between the analog and digital engines. The interface is independent of the version of Xcelium or Spectre. Therefore, any version of Xcelium (with flex support) will be able to connect to any version of Spectre (with flex support), to solve a mixed-signal circuit design.

Figure 2: Combinations of Spectre and Xcelium

The new AMSD flex architecture not only provides flexibility and efficiency but also provides better performance during simulation. Testing shows that the run time improved 20 percent on an average, using the exact same Spectre and Xcelium versions. The major enhancements in the AMSD flex mode include:

New architecture of the mixed-signal synchronization mechanism
Optimization of the interface elements
Better multi-threaded support

Many more new features from both analog and digital engines will be supported in the flex mode. The flex mode is the direction for AMS Designer's future developments!

Related Resources

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 AMSD, 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.

Qingyu Lin