Put a tiger into your simulator!
Put a tiger into your simulator!
No IC designer likes to run lengthy circuit simulations.
French startup Edxact S.A. is tackling that problem with Comanche, a parasitic
analysis tool that offers a "sanity check" for extracted netlists, so gross
violations can be found before simulation.
"Today you have to run heavy simulations to get answers to simple questions,"
said Edxact co-founder and president Mathias Silvant. "The idea [of Comanche]
is that problems related to interconnect can be detected before simulation. It's a
sanity check of the parasitic network."
First version's features
The first version of Comanche calculates resistance and
impedance between interconnect ports. From that the tool can find
such problems as opens, shorts and insufficient power connections.
By detecting signal phase changes and small resistance
variations, it can pinpoint critical parts of the circuit with signal-integrity
problems. It can also do simple preparatory analyses, thereby reducing the
burden on simulation.
Comanche accepts DSPF netlist parasitics as input and provides a table that
shows failures.
While there are no set limits on circuit size, users will typically constrain the
calculations. "You can run the whole circuit, but it would be a
problem to interpret. You can constrain the calculation to clock nets or just look
at power nets to analyze that specifications with respect to wire resistance aren't violated."
