SIMULATORS - Are they really fast enough?

Week long regressions are the main concerns of CAD and verification engineers when they have to deliver the product on time and meet TTM.CAD team will always look for high speed simulators and demand EDA vendors to tune their software engine to meet their run time requirements.


By looking at the technology changes of processors, memories and OS, I would say EDA vendors should really come up with new innovative methods and technologies to make their simulators powerful enough to exploit these new features of the latest hardware and software technologies. For example, if the simulator is not capable of utilizing all the cores of a processor innovatively to execute parallel processes and reduce the run time, then there is no benefit of changing the technology, like single core processor to core duo. If the technology of the simulator is not changing, it might even treat your big servers and machines that have high-end processors as only your old desktop PC.


At the same time, one should also understand that updating the hardwares and softwares of the simulation form is highly needed to expect more out of simulators. CAD team has to work closely with the EDA vendors and understand about their technology road map. They have to guide the project teams to use the right version of the EDA tools, understand the flows and methodologies. This will really help the design and verification engineers to use the EDA tools to the full extent.


Do you know how much you are paying for the EDA tools? Are you utilizing the EDA tools efficiently?


I am really surprised about the fact that many of the semiconductor industries do not even have proper CAD teams. Especially in India, we think that CAD team is needed just for managing the licensing issues. In many organizations, IT guys do the license management. But IT team cannot replace CAD team and CAD engineers can do much more on jobs like evaluating EDA tools, methodologies, integrating various point tools and creating the design flow etc. They can actually guide their management team to choose their preferred EDA vendor.


In my next article, I am going to explain how you can tune your simulator engine and run it at its maximum speed.