Incorporating true electromagnetic integrity encompassing Electromagnetic Interference Analysis (EMI), Signal Integrity (SI) and Power Integrity (PI) into the design cycle, involves applying the analysis results to the design to make the right design decisions. Today design and analysis are sequential activities that involve using a design system, transferring the design files to the analysis software and editing them to add features, materials, calculation requirements, etc. and finally running the electromagnetic integrity analysis. Any change in the design involves going through this slow, inefficient cycle. In the past this has been the norm because of limitations on resources (e.g. machines, software and time), and because electromagnetic solvers were relatively slow so there was no point in attempting to make them an “interactive design tool”.
However, with the advent of fast solvers and the possibility of exploiting massive parallelism, it is now possible to compute electromagnetic integrity for one or a few nets in minutes. Integrating such a fast, scalable solver with a design tool would allow designers to check if one net or group of nets works electromagnetically in minutes, while designing them. There now exists the opportunity for the designer to interactively design to the ultimate rather than the nominal.
Looking forward, it is easy to envision design exploration, e.g. alternative placements for sensitive package pins/pads and board balls, routing suggestions for problem traces for package or board routing, and ultimately parametric optimizations based on smart Monte-Carlo analysis that can run “in the background in a cloud”.
Packaging is emerging as a major way to provide speed and density while reducing power and form factor. Verification of these chip-package-systems increasingly requires electromagnetic integrity analysis, driven by frequency, low-voltage, density and 3DIC packaging trends. To address today’s and future system requirements in terms of accuracy, speed and scale, electromagnetic integrity needs an efficient full wave 3D solver and also to exploit parallelism extensively. It also needs to be able to provision the necessary compute resources on demand, e.g. in a cloud. The speed achieved in this manner allows us to envision incorporating electromagnetic integrity analysis into the design cycle. The size of problems that can be solved today allows designers to check electromagnetic integrity for very large systems, thus avoiding system failures, overdesign, reduced performance, lengthy design cycles, reduced profits and ultimately market failure.
nCloud, EDA’s first secure and scalable cloud computing solution, is igniting this new phase. Utilizing nCloud, solutions to even the most complex designs can be delivered cost-effectively in near real time.
nCloud offers multiple advantages
- On-demand provisioning of computing resources in minutes, with virtually unlimited scalability
- A highly secure compute platform
- Resources to exploit parallelism at the tool and at the design-methodology level
- An easy-to-use design environment with pre-installed and ready-to-run design tools
- Reduced need for on-premises hardware IT infrastructure
- Reduced need for upfront purchase of EDA licenses
- A cost-effective pay-for-use and pay-as-you-go software-as-a-service (SaaS) model
nWave, Nimbic’s flagship 3D, is a broadband, full-wave electromagnetic solver. nWave is based on proprietary accelerated boundary element technology that enables unprecedented speed and capacity, while preserving gold-standard Maxwell accuracy. nWave is built from the ground up to exploit multi-core and hybrid architectures, and to utilize the best of fast solver technology to enable fast simulation on single or many cores.
nWave’s integrated solution provides, in a unified interface, multiple options and features that typically are available only in multiple products. Designers can benefit from Signal Integrity, Power Integrity, Simultaneous Switching, and EMI features from this interface that exploits powerful broadband full-wave EM technology.
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