Circuit Simulator for RF, Analog, and Mixed-Signal
Nexxim is Ansoft's new circuit simulator that provides fast and accurate solutions for tough analog and mixed-signal circuits.
It provides the transistor-level simulation accuracy required for sensitive analog and wireless front-end circuits and the capacity to solve the complexities in modern mixed-signal integrated circuits. Transient and harmonic-balance simulations can be performed from a single netlist using the same time-domain device models for broad simulation and analysis of analog and RF circuits. New numerical algorithms and advanced software engineering combine to deliver orders of magnitude improvement in simulation speed, accuracy, and capacity. Full compatibility to HSpice netlist format provides full foundry device model support and allows Nexxim to integrate into most EDA flows. Dynamic links to the HFSS electromagnetic field solver provides on-chip passive and IC package modeling. Integration within the Ansoft Designer environment provides schematic capture, netlist generation and editing, simulation, dynamic links to system and planar EM simulation, and results post processing.
Innovative Integration
Nexxim integrates a multitude of algorithmic and software engineering innovations in a time- and frequency-domain circuit simulator. It delivers the simulation robustness, capacity, and speed required to address the needs of the RF/mixed-signal designer without sacrificing design accuracy.
Requirements of a Modern Circuit Simulator
As modern electronic design complexity increases and semiconductor processes decrease to submicron levels, demands on the circuit simulation technology increase. Nexxim provides the transistor-level simulation accuracy required for sensitive analog and wireless front-end circuits and the capacity to solve the complexities in modern mixed-signal integrated circuits. Time-domain (transient) and frequency-domain (harmonic balance, AC) simulations are all computed using the same circuit netlist and the same device models, thus guaranteeing that results in the different domains are consistent. Consequently, designers of high-performance ICs and PCBs will no longer have to spend countless hours reconciling results from different simulators, running from different netlists,\using different versions of device models .
On the software engineering side, Nexxim device models are created using an advanced model compiler, allowing built-in and user-defined models to become dynamically linked into the solver engine at runtime; user-defined models run as fast as built-in models. It also exploits modern generic programming techniques. In particular, the advanced usage of C++ templates makes the simulator extremely efficient by drastically reducing the maintainability and significantly improving scalability (for adding future analyses and platforms) without compromising runtime performance.
Built from the ground up, it integrates all required analyses for high-performance electronic design into a single simulator. It can be easily incorporated into existing design flows or invoked from Ansoft Designer, which offers a complete design capture, simulation and post-processing environment. Nexxim offers simulation accuracy and transistor-level detail without the use of model approximations. Its unmatched capacity and speed gains offer designers the ability to handle the high nonlinearities and large device counts characteristic of today's IC designs.
Ansoft Corporation
Ansoft Corp.
225 W. Station Square Dr., Ste. 200
Pittsburgh, PA, 15219-1119
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