ADE-XL

There is an enhancement coming in IC616 ISR9 (due out in about a week) which will optimize single job runs so that they run without an ICRP process and should simulate with a similar speed to ADE L.

With more jobs, the overhead is that you have to launch a background virtuoso for each job. These background jobs take care of configuring the design (if you've used parameterization), netlisting, simulation, and post-processing. Doing those tasks in the background is a good thing - because otherwise each of them could be a bottleneck if running in foreground, especially when you have multiple tests to contend with.

The thing to remember is that ADE XL is set up to handle multiple tests, corners, sweeps  and so on - and to manage a large number of jobs. So the infrastructure needs to support that - it would be no good if running 10 simulations at once caused it to get stuck on some serial task. We have done a lot of optimization during IC616 ISRs to improve performance when running many thousands of simulations in ADE XL, and now more recently have done this work to ensure that single simulations have similar performance to ADE L.

You can also improve matters by ensuring that virtuoso starts quickly by not including tons of code when run in ICRP mode - this can be done by putting sections in your .cdsinit such as:

unless(axlIsICRPProcess()
  load("someThirdPartyInterface.il")
  doSomethingForLayoutOnly()
)

The idea is to get the background virtuoso processes to be as nimble as possible.

Also, in your job policy, you can specify the "linger time" to be quite long - this way you only pay the overhead of starting the background processes once - subsequent simulations will be fast as it doesn't have this overhead again - it will just have netlisting and simulation launch to perform.

So overall, there should not be a significant performance issue in a well set up system. And in IC616 ISR9, the performance should be pretty much the same as ADE L for single simulations.

Regards,

Andrew.

There is an enhancement coming in IC616 ISR9 (due out in about a week) which will optimize single job runs so that they run without an ICRP process and should simulate with a similar speed to ADE L.

With more jobs, the overhead is that you have to launch a background virtuoso for each job. These background jobs take care of configuring the design (if you've used parameterization), netlisting, simulation, and post-processing. Doing those tasks in the background is a good thing - because otherwise each of them could be a bottleneck if running in foreground, especially when you have multiple tests to contend with.

The thing to remember is that ADE XL is set up to handle multiple tests, corners, sweeps  and so on - and to manage a large number of jobs. So the infrastructure needs to support that - it would be no good if running 10 simulations at once caused it to get stuck on some serial task. We have done a lot of optimization during IC616 ISRs to improve performance when running many thousands of simulations in ADE XL, and now more recently have done this work to ensure that single simulations have similar performance to ADE L.

You can also improve matters by ensuring that virtuoso starts quickly by not including tons of code when run in ICRP mode - this can be done by putting sections in your .cdsinit such as:

unless(axlIsICRPProcess()
  load("someThirdPartyInterface.il")
  doSomethingForLayoutOnly()
)

The idea is to get the background virtuoso processes to be as nimble as possible.

Also, in your job policy, you can specify the "linger time" to be quite long - this way you only pay the overhead of starting the background processes once - subsequent simulations will be fast as it doesn't have this overhead again - it will just have netlisting and simulation launch to perform.

So overall, there should not be a significant performance issue in a well set up system. And in IC616 ISR9, the performance should be pretty much the same as ADE L for single simulations.

Regards,

Andrew.