acquisitionZONE Products for the week of February 24, 2003
"Creative Genius v2 answers analog and mixed-signal designers' growing needs for better optimization tools," said Amit Gupta, vice president of marketing and business development for ADA. "The increasing amount of analog content in ICs means that designers are having to optimize more connected devices than ever in complex blocks. Their feedback was instrumental in ADA's introduction of high capacity optimization tools to automate the front-end analog design process."
ADA's Creative Genius v2 uses a patent-pending high capacity optimization engine that offers a significant improvement in speed over previously announced Genius products. Creative Genius v2 features an upgraded parallel computing architecture that allows multiple automation tasks to be configured and run simultaneously with simulator capacity of up to 100 at one time. In addition, Creative Genius v2 is able to handle multiple topologies during simultaneous optimization runs.
"ADA has a unique and powerful tool set in Creative Genius v2," said Gerald S. Worchel, Senior Analyst at In-Stat/MDR. "With ADA's latest offering, designers have full control of the optimization process to generate several optimized solutions - a far cry over traditional low-capacity and medium-capacity optimization products that offer only a single solution. I believe that analog and mixed signal engineers need and desire the flexibility of a fully automated high capacity optimizer, which has been a long time in coming."
Other enhancements in Creative Genius v2 include an automation environment providing fast and easy circuit parameterization, testbench setup and improved goal specification, all of which reduce time and effort spent on tedious, manual analog circuit design from weeks to days or even hours. The installation, setup and design environment integration have also been improved, reducing the time and effort designers spend preparing to run circuit optimizations.
"The new Genius v2 product family allows designers to push the limits of their design objectives, while saving valuable time," said Chris Labrecque, product line manager and co-founder for ADA. "Our customers are particularly impressed with the analysis capabilities that IP Explorer v2 brings to the table. The flexibility we've built into IP Explorer v2 allows designers to intelligently compare multiple optimized circuit options for their application without being held captive to one supposedly "best" solution."
Using interactive control and plotting options in IP Explorer v2, designers can intuitively compare performance tradeoffs among potential solutions to choose the circuit that will best suit an application's performance specification across all environmental and manufacturing process variations.
IP Explorer v2 can also compare circuit solutions across multiple topologies,
allowing for easier design reuse.
analogZONE Says . . .
Putting "analog" and "EDA" in the same sentence has, for many years, brought derisive smirks and lifted eyebrows from the very people the tools were supposed to help. Just getting past the front lobby of a semiconductor manufacturer has been increasingly difficult for the vendors. Such skepticism should not be hurled at these improved products from Analog Design Automation.
The company's mission is stated to be, "To enable analog and mixed-signal designers to rapidly create optimal designs and capture and visualize libraries of re-useable semiconductor intellectual property." From the demonstration that I have seen that is exactly what Genius v2 and IP Explorer v2 have achieved. Yes, there are size limitations, but I doubt there is any design that cannot be broken down into chunks that can be managed by the tools.
Many analog design engineers will probably still be dismissive; we're really good at being elitists and that's perfectly OK, provided you are still willing to listen to something that is new. We all know the handful of semiconductor designers who instinctively know the size of the transistors needed in various parts of a solution; we've seen the results of their first silicon matching the design goals, and better. And those designers are closely held by their companies because of those skills. But I would bet that these products would improve the performance of even the best out there. And the majority of designers are not in that league and can use all the help they can get. Even in the environment where design teams are employed these tools will improve productivity, and for management the story is even better: You will be able to predict the size and duration of a design effort much closer than ever before; you will even know whether the architecture you envisioned is going to work a lot earlier in the game. And you will avoid re-spins, the expensive nightmare the industry lives with.
When you get down to the poor digital design engineer who has been told to complete the work by putting an I/O together, for example, these tools will work with your current simulator and design environments to make the whole process seamless. Provided you can define the specifications your product needs you will be able to produce the best results - with considerable speed.
I haven't talked here about the tools themselves and what they do and how they are used. The company's release is quite clear on many of the features and the brochures can explain the details better than I can - but the only way that you will be able to really judge these tools is by getting a demonstration to see how intuitive they are. ADA should have no problems getting demos set up at companies that are mainly digital and have few, or no, analog designers on staff. And even if they've been using consultants for the analog portions they will find that the tools will pay for themselves very rapidly. But with the strictly analog semiconductor manufacturers I could write a list of those who would be receptive to a demo, and those where the design managers will get in the way - whatever the designers themselves think. They'll have to come across to analog EDA tools eventually, but there are some really stubborn individuals out there.
ADA has raised enough money (from names like Intel Capital and Synopsys - although the company intends its tools to be platform neutral) that it should get its products into the easiest slots within 2 years and still survive for the stubborn holdouts later on.
Just in case my message didn't get through clearly
yet: Get a demo!