EW – Design Edition – Altium PCB Design Software, Imagination Ray Tracing Tech& More

Altium PCB Design Software

Designer 19.1 software. (Image courtesy of Altium.)

Altium has released its Designer 19.1 software and the 365 Viewer, a free online tool that allows anyone to view Altium Designer projects on the web. Designer 19.1 provides a number of enhancements and improvements to the software’s performance and stability, reducing the occurrence of errors and increasing productive design time and efficiency.

For more information, visit Altium’s website.

Cadence Massively Parallel Circuit Simulator

Spectre X simulator. (Image courtesy of Cadence.)

Cadence has announced its Spectre X simulator, a massively parallel circuit simulator designed to provide up to 10X performance gains. The Spectre X simulator can solve 5X larger designs when compared to previous versions, allowing users to effectively simulate circuits containing millions of transistors and billions of parasitics in a post-layout verification flow.

The Spectre X simulator is also integrated with the Cadence Xcelium Parallel Logic Simulation for mixed-signal verification using Spectre AMS Designer, providing support for mixed-signal behavioral languages and real number modeling methodologies.

For more information, visit Cadence’s website.

Imagination Ray Tracing Technology

PowerVR. (Image courtesy of Imagination Technologies.)

Imagination Technologies has introduced its PowerVR Ray Tracing technology, enabling realistic image rendering using light-modelling techniques to be integrated into graphics processing units (GPUs) across mobile, automotive, server and other industries.

The PowerVR Ray Tracing architecture is an efficient approach for the processing of billions of rays per second (also known as “gigarays”). It lets System on Chip (SoC) manufacturers offer ray tracing capable hardware within a range of power and thermal envelopes. The technology is suited for adding realistic ray traced light, shadow and transparency capabilities to traditional GPUs or even creating full ray tracing systems.

For more information, visit Imagination’s website.

NI Updates LabVIEW Software

LabVIEW NXG. (Image courtesy of National Instruments.)

National Instruments (NI) has updated its LabVIEW and LabVIEW NXG software. The latest release of LabVIEW 2019 features improved visibility in the IDE, enhancements in debugging, and new datatypes to the G-language. Additionally, LabVIEW 2019 addresses a recurring pain point for engineers: managing dependencies and versioning with fragmented, non-standardized methods, which continue to create challenges in code deployment.

For more information, visit NI’s website.

SILVACO Characterization for Nanometer Silicon

Viola 10X. (Image courtesy of SILVACO.)

SILVACO has unveiled Viola 10X, a scalable semiconductor IP characterization and modeling tool. By utilizing intelligent optimization (providing 10X faster performance) and embedding the company’s SmartSpice simulator and Jivaro-A reduction technology, the automated Viola 10X flow delivers accurate modeling and characterization of standard cell libraries, input/output (I/O) pad circuitry and digital memories for designs targeted at nanometer process nodes.

In essence, Viola 10X is a characterization system that automatically performs static structural analysis on transistor-level netlists of standard cells and complex custom cells or macros.

For more information, visit SILVACO’s website.

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