Cadence unleashes the fFuture of analogue, custom and RFIC design

Virtuoso Studio features a reimagined infrastructure with a different approach to managing design processes and allows more than a 3X improvement in design throughput for today’s largest designs, enabling customers to meet aggressive time-to-market goals.

Virtuoso Studio addresses the challenges customers face with larger, more complex designs, empowering them to analyse and verify designs to ensure that design intent is maintained throughout the design cycle. This new platform features seamless integration with other Cadence solutions, including the Cadence Spectre Simulation Platform, Cadence Allegro PCB Design and Cadence Pegasus Verification System, removing traditional barriers between different design domains and speeding design closure.

Virtuoso Studio is newly integrated with the AWR Microwave Office solution, and the Pegasus Design Rule Check (DRC) Solution and Layout Versus Schematic (LVS) Solution are now available from within the Virtuoso Layout Suite. These provide advanced mmWave design and interactive signoff quality analysis during layout creation.

Additionally, customers can access the Spectre Simulation Platform, including the Spectre X Simulator and Spectre FX Simulator, through Virtuoso Studio, which allows for the analysis of the industry’s largest analogue and mixed-signal designs.

The Virtuoso Studio platform offers customers the same great experience they are accustomed to, with the following benefits to address growing complexity:

• Proven Solution: Virtuoso Studio continues to offer the secure, proven solutions that companies and foundries have trusted for 30 years for their analogue, RFIC and mixed-signal designs.
• Improved Productivity: Design teams can leverage comprehensive planar and FinFET-based layout placement automation and new routing solutions to improve engineering productivity.
• Cloud-Ready: Virtuoso Studio offers massively scalable, cloud-ready solutions for occurrences when hundreds of simulations turn into thousands. It is optimised for customers’ preferred cloud providers or ready for private cloud deployment.
• Generative AI for Design Migration: The foundry-supported solutions ease the burden of process migration for schematics and layouts. Tools within the Virtuoso ADE Suite quickly re-centre and validate designs post-migration, so customers can achieve aggressive time-to-market goals. Customers can utilise the AI-enabled tools to take existing IP and transform it for their next-generation designs.
• 3D-IC Integration: Virtuoso Studio allows the heterogeneous integration of 2.5D and 3D designs for advanced nodes, analog/RF packaging/modules and photonics systems.

Virtuoso Studio stays at the forefront of delivering designs accurately and on time through innovative improvements in traditional custom design tools.

The Design Space Optimisation feature lets customers utilise AI algorithms to navigate competing specifications and aid in design centering, particularly after the process migration of a design. Customers can experience faster interactive editing in both the layout and schematic tools, thanks to optimised code and algorithms, while multi-threading accelerates rendering, connectivity extraction and design rule checks in parallel.

Additionally, the Cadence Spectre FMC Analysis is integrated into Virtuoso Studio and provides a complete machine

learning (ML)-based Monte Carlo variation solution to deliver a 3-to-6-sigma yield with orders of magnitude speedup over brute force Monte Carlo analysis.

“Cadence continues its commitment to providing customers with the most comprehensive set of integrated tools and solutions that make it simpler for our customers to design and verify emerging heterogeneous systems,” said Tom Beckley, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Custom IC & PCB Group at Cadence.

“Virtuoso Studio sets the new industry standard for doing analogue, mixed-signal, RF and photonics design. Customers get access to the same Virtuoso experience they are accustomed to with improvements that address the latest design challenges.”