Friday, April 11, 2008

Nascentric Rolls Out New Circuit Design Simulator

Nascentric, the Austin-based firm which develops SPICE simulation software used by the semiconductor design industry, has rolled out a new product which has taken a unique spin on combining software simulation with hardware acceleration. The firm said its new product, OmegaSim GX, uses NVIDIA graphics processing hardware to accelerate the speed of SPICE simulation. SPICE is a software tool used by hardware designers to design and test very high speed circuits at the transistor level. According to Nascentric the new tool uses NVIDIA's Tesla hardware to create a massively parallel, multi-threaded environment for conducting Fast-SPICE simulations. Nascentric said the platform can take circuit simulations which normally would take hours, days, and weeks down to minutes and hours. SPICE simulations are normally very time consuming calculations, and are used to simulate the electromagnetic effects of routing between transistors on ICs. NVIDIA's graphic processing hardware is usually used for accelerating graphics rendering for video games and other video.