Virtuoso Meets Maxwell: Virtuoso Electromagnetic Solver Assistant -Support for Iterated Instances

'Virtuoso Meets Maxwell' is a blog series aimed at exploring the capabilities and potential of Virtuoso® Multi-Technology Solution, Virtuoso Electromagnetic Simulations, and Virtuoso RF Solution. So, how does Virtuoso meet Maxwell? Now, Virtuoso platform supports RF designs, and the RF designers measure the physical and radiation effects by using Maxwell's equations. In addition to providing insights into the useful software enhancements, this series broadcasts the voices of different bloggers and experts about their knowledge and experience of various tools in the Virtuoso IC-Packaging world, along with the nuances of RF, microwave, and high-frequency designs. Watch out for our posts on Mondays.

An iterated instance refers to an array of multiple instances. It is a compact way of displaying repeated instances of a symbol in a schematic, particularly useful in bus-type or data-flow architectures that have identical structures to handle each bit on the bus.

This feature reduces the final netlist size, which further results in significant decrease in the time taken to generate a netlist.

The Virtuoso Electromagnetic Solver assistant provides a smart capability to partition the circuit without changing the golden design. Indeed, you can select the passive instances and nets hierarchically that need to be simulated with the EMX solver or Clarity 3D solver while the active portion of the circuit will be extracted with the Quantus Extraction Solution. This is named as the schematic-driven flow. There can be scenarios where the designer need not include the entire iterated instance or entire bus net to the EM model but need to see impact of just a part of arrayed instance or net on the final simulation.

In this blog, you will see how to use the “Iterated Instance support” capability in the schematic-driven flow.

Let’s look at the following testcase: 

The testcase contains two Iterated Resistors R2<1:0> and R3<1:0>.

For an EM model, you will take a scalar components for these iterated instances.
Instances R2<1> and  R3<1> are added to the model.

The resistors added to model will have two ports each; therefore, four ports are expected.

Subsequently, mesh and simulate the model. Once simulation is complete, generate the extracted view of the model using “” button in the EM solver.

Last step is to review the emsolver_extracted view generated.

The connectivity is as expected. The nport instance is connected to the scalar resistor instance that were not selected in the model.

Similar the example shown, you may also include bus nets to be a part of model and repeat the exercise.

This support gives flexibility to you in defining their EM models

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Udit Kapoor

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About Virtuoso Meets Maxwell

Virtuoso Meets Maxwell series includes posts about the next-generation die, package, and board design flow with a focus on reinventing and optimizing the design process to ensure that the designer remains a designer! Keep watching! Subscribe to receive email notifications about our latest Custom IC Design blog posts.