Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1472851
38 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2022 in our thermal tool called Celsius. And so the massive parallelization of being able to break that problem apart and solve it in parallel and then bring it all together and give accurate results. at's what really empowers us to do that. We have this massive parallelization because they solved this on the IC side a long time ago for the Voltus power delivery network tool. at matrix solver was developed to solve a much bigger problem. And then as these sys- tem problems become the bigger problems, the technology is waiting for us, ready to be reused in the PCB space. Johnson: Where else is it being used? Griffin: PDN power integrity. e main areas are SI, PI, thermal, and then the chip level power as well. We had a customer call us, and he was using the version of our tool from two years ago. He said, "It's taking five days to solve this." is was with the version I told you nor- mally happens in 15 minutes. is guy was run- ning a really big problem and it was taking five days. We said, "Well, have you tried the new version?" He said, "Oh, I don't have a license for that." So, we got a demo license for every- thing. He ran the simulation, and results came back in eight hours. Johnson: Five days down to eight hours. at's nice. Griffin: It works. It basically works across all the different tools that we have. We have all this technology in the IC side, we've brought it into the system tools. It's no longer a feature thing. Engineers are empowered. It's just so frustrating when these full wave 3D field solv- ers force you to break it down to something so small that your computer will actually solve it. en when you solve it, you don't know if the results are right. It's so frustrating. With us, you just don't break it down. You just put the whole thing in, you solve it. It uses potentially more computing resources, but it's also more efficient. We used to talk about the three types of simu- lations for signal integrity matters. e first is while you wait; push the button, get your answer back. en we have the coffee break because you talk to somebody for a few minutes, while your answer comes back. en there was over- night. What happened is the problems got more and more complicated; overnight became over the weekend and over the weekend became over the week. Now what we've done in many cases is brought it back to overnight. Johnson: Right. And six and a half days into a seven-day run and it crashes. Griffin: at can certainly happen when you're consuming the amounts of memory that these tools are. I don't want to say we're perfect. But we do hear from customers that the other tools crashed six times, but the Clarity tool worked. With limited resources to simulate within his boundaries we were able to solve this problem. Johnson: at's the magic. Anything else about this that we should talk about? Griffin: I think we talked through the cloud, and we talked about Celsius. We talked about Sig- rity X, which is what we call the new version that has the 10X faster simulation capabilities. And that's where the matrix solver comes in. So those are the three things that I would like to highlight. Johnson: Excellent. Brad, thank you. Griffin: Sure. My pleasure. DESIGN007 Download The System Designer's Guide to… System Analysis by Brad Griffin along with its companion book The Cadence System Design Solutions Guide. You can also view other titles in our full I-007e book library here.