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Computer industry

Hewlett-Packard and Silvaco Partner to Enhance IC Design Simulation

Strategic Insights

— 1 min read

Hewlett-Packard Company and Silvaco International have collaborated to port Silvaco's suite of TCAD Driven CAD tools to HP's HP-UX 11 64-bit UNIX system operating environment. This partnership aims to provide IC design engineers with significantly reduced simulation times for their designs. Silvaco's tools, such as SmartSpice and Atlas, have been rewritten to utilize HP's native support for parallelism through multithreading.

Silvaco's TCAD Driven CAD simulation suite now takes full advantage of the Exemplar servers' increased speed and computing power, with multiple CPU architecture significantly accelerating a single simulation job, thereby slashing simulation times without affecting accuracy. The Exemplar servers scale to 16 CPUs and 16GB RAM, making them an ideal EDA platform for IC designers.

Key Takeaways:

  • Silvaco's TCAD Driven CAD simulation suite has been ported to HP's HP-UX 11 64-bit UNIX system operating environment.
  • Silvaco's tools, such as SmartSpice and Atlas, have been rewritten to utilize HP's native support for parallelism through multithreading.
  • The combination of Silvaco's TCAD Driven CAD tools and HP's Exemplar servers provides a significant reduction in simulation times for IC design engineers.
  • The Exemplar servers' multiple CPU architecture accelerates simulation jobs, significantly reducing simulation times without affecting accuracy.
  • Silvaco's SmartSpice provides industry-leading performance for modern analog design, with support for advanced device models and innovative numerics.
  • Silvaco's Atlas simulates silicon devices and other advanced-materials devices, with a modular and extensible solution for 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D device simulation.
  • The HP Exemplar servers are ideal for EDA (Electronic Design Automation) due to their performance, scalability, reliability, and high availability.

Statistics:

  • HP's Exemplar servers scale to 16 CPUs and 16GB RAM.
  • Silvaco's TCAD Driven CAD simulation suite provides a significant reduction in simulation times, with accuracy unaffected.
  • The 1997 fiscal year revenue for Hewlett-Packard Company was $42.9 billion, with computer-related revenue exceeding $35.4 billion.
  • HP has 125,300 employees worldwide.
  • The HP Exemplar servers feature industry-leading PA-8200 PA-RISC processors and 4MB of cache memory.

Sources:

  • Hewlett-Packard Company press release, June 15, 1998.
  • Silvaco International press release, June 15, 1998.
  • HP website: http://www.hp.com.
  • Silvaco website: http://www.silvaco.com.
  • UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

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