January 25, 2008 -- Agilent Technologies, Inc. has announced the capability for multiple, parallel circuit simulations (Quad-Pack) from a single license in its GoldenGate RFIC simulation, analysis and verification software suite. The company also announced enhancements to the software’s design-for-yield (DFY) capabilities.

"Large-scale RFIC design and simulation is one of the most demanding activities designers face," said John Barr, Product Marketing Manager with Agilent’s EEsof EDA division. "Designers simply run out of time to do serial simulations and DFY experiments. This latest GoldenGate release removes many of the time constraints associated with simulation, eliminating designer downtime and resulting in faster and better fabrication yields."

The Agilent GoldenGate Quad-Pack feature is part of the 4.1.8 release of the GoldenGate software package. It is the only tool of its kind available today that allows multiple simulations from a single software license. With GoldenGate’s Quad-Pack, designers can verify designs across process, voltage and temperature variations via an efficient, parallel Monte Carlo capability that allows up to four simultaneous simulations, freeing up the design portion of the license for other design work. It does this by taking full advantage of today’s modern multi-core computer processing technologies commonly available in design-team computer networks.

Agilent’s GoldenGate software is an advanced RFIC simulation and analysis solution for integrated RFIC design. Its unique simulation algorithms are optimized for the challenging demands of today’s complex RFIC design, enabling full characterization of complete transceivers prior to tape out. To ensure device manufacturability and reduce design spins, GoldenGate takes advantage of frequency-domain capabilities to perform necessary analyses such as statistical yield simulations at speeds up to orders of magnitude faster than traditional transient-based techniques.

This latest GoldenGate release also includes these productivity enhancing features:

Support for the Cadence ADE Corners Tools (IC 5.1), allowing designers to run multiple corner simulations in parallel with the Quad-Pack feature; A new boundary mode Monte Carlo with the orthogonal array option for better coverage with fewer trials; and, A new display for monitoring the simulation progress in parallel and viewing trial results even while the simulation is running.

GoldenGate SuperLicenses are available for additional parallel-simulation capabilities for designers with access to large compute farms. These SuperLicenses can provide 10 or 20 additional parallel simulator licenses.

Pricing and Availability