Overview

OmegaSim™ GX is the worlds' first hardware-accelerated SPICE simulator. Powered by NVIDIA Tesla Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), it is the first and only off-the-shelf hardware-based simulator in the EDA industry. OmegaSim GX offers unprecedented performance for analog and mixed-analog-digital circuits, without compromising accuracy. Leveraging off-the-shelf GPU hardware not only keeps costs low (starting at $1,299 for a Tesla C-870 PCI express add-in graphics card), but enables users to benefit from NVIDIA’s continual performance and architectural improvements to address their large graphics chip market.

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Background

SPICE simulators are used for detailed circuit analysis, in particular after an Integrated Circuit (IC) is placed and routed. SPICE simulation of even a small, but critical portion of an IC can take weeks or months to complete. Faster SPICE simulators, often referred to as Fast-SPICE, are typically an order or two magnitudes faster than SPICE simulators, but they achieve the additional performance at the expense of accuracy, which can differ from SPICE by as much as 5% to 10%.

In early 2008, Nascentric announced OmegaSim, the industry’s first multi-threaded Fast-SPICE simulator for analog mixed-signal designs. OmegaSim offers 10X the performance of competitive simulators, with accuracy of 2% to 5% of SPICE, and handles designs of tens of millions of devices.. Now, using NVIDIA’s Tesla GPUs, OmegaSim GX achieves Fast-SPICE level performance with SPICE-level accuracy.

OmegaSim GX provides orders of magnitude better performance than other FastSPICE tools, yet maintains SPICE-level accuracy.

Mixed-Signal Accuracy

Mixed-signal design blocks contain highly-sensitive analog circuits which require greater accuracy than most Fast-SPICE tools offer. OmegaSim GX, however, can handle large mixed-signal blocks as a whole, with millions of parasitics, while maintaining accuracy to less than 0.5% of SPICE.

Complex Calculations

SPICE simulation requires solving a complex system of non-linear equations. When running SPICE in its most accurate mode, nearly ninety percent of the CPU time during simulation is spent evaluating transistors. These evaluations are computationally intensive. OmegaSim GX dispatches these evaluations to NVIDIA’s GPUs, which simulate them in a fraction of time that a CPU core would require, thus speeding the simulation considerably. Typical acceleration using OmegaSim GX ranges from 5X to 8X compared to software-only OmegaSim simulation.

Multi-threading

Nascentric built the OmegaSim product line from the ground up with multi-threading and multi-processing capabilities. Thus OmegaSim GX can also be multi-threaded on multi-core CPU platforms. For instance, on an 8-core machine, each CPU offloads transistor evaluations to the resident GPU, thereby freeing 8 threads that can be used to further accelerate the remaining simulation tasks.

NVIDIA GPUs

OmegaSim GX is based on NVIDIA’s Tesla hardware platform that provides a massively parallel multi-threaded architecture. The platform is available as a 128-core PCI Express add-in card, a 256-core desk-side or a 512-core rack-mounted system configuration. Hardware is sold separately and is available from NVIDIA, its partners or resellers.