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:: Black Forest Engineering (BFE)
:: Infolytica Corp. 
:: Lynguent
:: Ridgetop Group
:: Snowbush Microelectronics
:: Systems'ViP
:: Universite Lyon 1
Scott MacIntosh - Design Engineer |
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Black Forest Engineering (BFE) is located in Colorado Springs, Colorado and develops custom analog and mixed signal integrated circuits. BFE specializes in sensor readout and display technologies, but has a wide variety of experiences with many applications. We have used SMASH as our primary simulator for a number of years and have recently started using the SLED schematic entry.
The mixed-signal simulation capabilities of SMASH, combined with the SLED schematic entry, have simplified the setup of our large, mixed-language simulations. The process of incorporating models in various languages is straight-forward with very little overhead. The fact that all schematic, symbol and configuration files in SLED are in ASCII format has allowed us to automate certain schematic changes which has helped decrease design and verification times. Support from Dolphin for SMASH and SLED has been excellent and they have always been very interested in suggestions for new and/or improved features. In terms of simulation speed, SMASH has performed very well overall in benchmarking tests we have run and simulation times were much faster than similarly priced simulators.
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Black Forest Engineering
www.bfe.com
Colorado Springs - USA |
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Derek Dyck - Project leader |
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Infolytica corporation specializes in the modeling and simulation of electromagnetic devices using finite element analysis. Our capability to characterize the behaviour of motors, generators and actuators as VHDL-AMS models allows the designer to work with very accurate models within a system simulation. We found the SMASH implementation of VHDL-AMS supports all of the features required in the models we generate. In particular the large data sets (on the order of 10,000 parameters) required to accurately characterize three-phase rotating machines was handled speedily and efficiently by the SMASH simulator
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James Holmes - Vice President, Research & Applications Consulting of Lynguent |
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Lynguent has developed the ModLyng™ Integrated Modeling Environment (IME) for creating and maintaining analog and mixed-signal models. Customers graphically develop their models in a language- and platform-independent way, and they must be confident that the models exported in the HDL of their choice will simulate properly when they are ready to deploy them in their design flow. In turn, Lynguent needs a “gold standard” to validate the generated HDL code, and that is what SMASH has been for us for VHDL-AMS.
We found the SMASH implementation of VHDL-AMS (IEEE 1076.1) is quite LRM-compliant, a very important feature for us. We also appreciate the seamless integration of SPICE with VHDL-AMS and the other supported languages. We were able to get up to speed with SMASH quite quickly because it is easy to use and the documentation is very good. On the few occasions when we had problems, we received rapid and thorough support.
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Douglas Goodman - President and CEO of Ridgetop Group |
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Ridgetop Group, Inc. of Tucson, Arizona, provides design services for space satellite electronics operating in extremely harsh environments. The ICs and boards used in these applications must be radiation-hardened, so that the circuits will function properly when subjected to radiation. Standard device models do not incorporate these external radiation effects.
The radiation-hardening design process requires that unique equations governing the exposure to total ionizing dose (TID), dose rate, and single event effect (SEE) radiation be added to the simulation models to model these effects. VHDL-AMS provides an effective framework for incorporating these radiation effects, and the full compliance of SMASH with the VHDL-AMS language, along with its strong multi-domain and mixed-signal simulation capabilities of its single kernel simulation engine, have been leveraged by Ridgetop to design these complex circuits.
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Ken Martin - President of Snowbush Microelectronics and Professor of
Microelectronics at the University of Toronto |
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At Snowbush, we focus on high-end analog and mixed-mode interfaces with
wired channels; currently, we have significant and increasing activities
(over 50 employees) especially in the areas of high-speed serializers and
deserializers, and high-frequency ADC-based AFE's. Practically all of our
designs include significant amounts of digital circuits for calibration and
programmability, and require a mixed-mode simulator. We focus on system
design as well as circuit design. In these applications SMASH excels.
Although we use many simulators at Snowbush, I personally have been using
SMASH extensively for almost 6 years and exclusively for the last 4 years.
Like all simulators, SMASH has had problems; when these occurred, the
support from Dolphin has been immediate and excellent. In addition, SMASH's
compatibility with other simulators and foundry provided transistor models
has been significantly improved recently and these are no longer
limitations. Some significant areas SMASH excels in: operating point
convergence (best I've encountered), mixed transistor/verilog simulation
(some start-up time, but very powerful), and fast accurate simulations
(top-of-the-class for prediction of distortion). Perhaps even more enabling:
SMASH's AKO capability makes Monte Carlo simulations possible and simple,
even when foundry matching information is not available. Another enabling
capability, that has been used extensively at Snowbush, is the C-modelling
using the ABCD approach (for behavioral DAC's, ADC's, S/H's, PGA's,
digitally-controlled oscillators, etc.). I personally prefer SMASH over all
other alternatives.
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Doctor Yannick Hervé - VHDL-AMS Expert - Co-founder and scientific advisor for Systems'VIP |
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A thermo-magneto-fluidic model of 10,751 equations was simulated without any
problem, in a reasonable time of 5 seconds system time for 41 minutes
simulation time, with a minimum time step of 10 ms. I am pretty certain that
the developed model is the most complex ever realized worldwide in VHDL-AMS.
It is generic in its size and the very interdependent equations are
non-linear with time variable coefficients. Due to the quality of the SMASH
compiler (generate, vector, matrix terminals…), the code is very compact and
readable. Furthermore, discontinuities are very well handled and generate no
convergence issues.
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Systems'ViP
Strasbourg - FRANCE |
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Laurent Quiquerez - Assistant Professor |
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We develop and implement multi-physics models for the design of highly
coupled multi-domain systems.
Our current projects, illustrated in TAISA’2007 papers, address:
- fluidic systems: a non-quasi static model transport model in
fluidic micro-channels
- systems for mechanical energy damping and harvesting: mechanical
and electro-mechanical models of piezo-electric patches.
In our experience, SMASH has the best coverage of VHDL-AMS IEEE
standard. Thanks to this, our models show compact and readable sources.
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Universite Lyon 1 - Institut des Nanotechnologies de Lyon
inl.cnrs.fr
Villeurbanne - FRANCE |
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