Siemens Introduces mPower Power Integrity Solution for Analog, Digital, and Mixed-Signal IC Designs
September 28, 2021
News
According to Siemens Digital Industries Software, the new software is the industry’s first and only IC power integrity verification solution designed to provide virtually unlimited scalability for analog, digital, and mixed signal ICs.
The solution also enables comprehensive power, electromigration (EM), and voltage drop (IR) analysis for large IC designs.
mPower software is designed to deliver power integrity analysis for all versions of 2D designs, in addition to 2.5/3D IC implementations at any scale, and integrate into existing design flows. Using mPower, IC designers can verify that their designs meet power-related design goals -- capabilities that can help IC customers boost quality, enhance reliability, and speed time to market.
Analog ICs convert physical, “real world” data such as sound, motion, and video into digital form, making them critical to a range of key applications, including consumer electronics, autonomous vehicles, Internet of Things, and other markets.
For analog IC designers, mPower replaces rough static analysis and SPICE simulation of select nets with a solution that delivers accurate, simulation-based EM/IR analysis on large blocks and chips. Per the company, customers using mPower have seen overall runtime improvements vs. their current solution, ranging from 2X faster to actually completing first-pass EM/IR analysis of large analog IP blocks, which was previously impossible.
“Siemens’ mPower allows us to do something we have never been able to do before,” said Dr. Paolo Miliozzi, vice president of SoC Design and Technology at MaxLinear. “And that is to assess EM/IR during tapeout of large analog circuits with confidence.”
In addition to its analog functionality, Siemens’ new digital mPower scalable EM/IR engines also provide “no compromise” analysis for all-digital IC designs.
“Before using mPower, we could not do a single-run full chip EM/IR analysis on our 1000+ core 64-bit RISC-V AI chip,” said Darren Jones, vice president of VLSI at Esperanto, a leading developer of AI compute solutions. “Using mPower enables us to run our 24-billion transistor 7nm AI chip on our server farm with fewer resources, and with better turn-around time than we previously thought possible.”
The mPower power integrity solution completes Siemens’ overall electro-physical signoff suite addressing power, performance, and reliability analysis. Other offerings in this suite include Calibre PERC software, PowerPro software, HyperLynx software, and the Analog FastSPICE platforms. With this comprehensive signoff suite, designers can now use an all-Siemens power integrity design flow.
Siemens’ mPower power integrity analysis solution for analog, digital and mixed-signal IC designs is available now.
For more information, visit: https://eda.sw.siemens.com/en-US/ic/mpower/
