Simulation and Design

The SPPDG simulation and analysis capabilities are focused on effective modeling of high performance systems and technologies to ensure first pass design success and to aid in developing new integrated circuit and packaging technologies. With a significant effort involved in the development of very high speed digital systems (i.e., often exceeding 10 Gbps [gigabits per second] data rates with active research in attaining up to 100 Gbps), the SPPDG is continually analyzing new and experimental semiconductor technologies. At the same time, the SPPDG continues to exploit conventional semiconductor technologies such as bulk complimentary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS).

Outside the purely digital regime, the SPPDG simulates and analyzes various mixed signal and wireless systems ranging in frequency from L-Band (e.g., Global Positioning System [GPS] receiver at 1.575 GHz) to V-Band (50-75 GHz) and up to W-band (75-110 GHz). To ensure that the full bandwidth of the various integrated circuit (IC) technologies is realized in a systems environment, careful attention must be given to packaging technologies for both mainstream IC technologies, utilizing many signals at moderate data rates, and high performance IC technologies, which utilize only a few signals operating at ultra-high data rates.

Since the SPPDG collaborates with many industrial, university, and government research and development organizations, we must have a wide variety of design tools and suites available. Commercial computer aided design (CAD) suites can be quite expensive, but are required for many collaborations. University-developed software packages and open source software are used when appropriate. In addition, Mayo develops some modeling and analysis tools and specialty scripts "in house". The commercial design tool suites available to the SPPDG include:

• Synopsys HSPICE circuit simulator
• Orcad EE Designer
• Cadence analog and digital IC and SPB design tools
• DownStream Technologies BluePrint for PCB design documentation
• Mentor Calibre IC verification tools and ModelSim HDL simulator
• Keysight ADS and GoldenGate
• Sonnet Suites EM solver
• ANSYS HFSS, SIwave, Q3D and ECAD translators
• CST Microwave Studio Suite
• Altera Quartus and Xilinx Vivado FPGA suites
• AutoCAD, Mastercam and SolidWorks for mechanical CAD
• Matlab, Mathematica, SAS, and other analysis tools
• SIMetrix/SIMPLIS circuit simulation software for power supply design
• IAR Systems Embedded Workbench for embedded systems design
• National Instruments LabView for data acquisition & analysis, instrument control and automated testing