Antrim's windowed environment supports analog designs

Antrim's windowed environment supports analog designs
By Stephan Ohr, EE Times
June 4, 2002 (6:03 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020514S0018

SAN FRANCISCO — Antrim Design Systems Inc. will present this week a new version of its analog and mixed-signal design environment. Antrim's Aptivia is a Windows-like environment that manages the creation, analysis, characterization and verification of chip designs.

"We'd like to be the Microsoft Windows for design engineers," said Len Hills, director of marketing for Antrim, based in Scotts Valley, Calif. The Aptivia design environment offers a graphical user interface rather than a text command system, Hills said. Designers can view multiple projects on the same screen. Aptivia even supports such steps as "cut and paste" and "drag-and-drop" between projects in different windows.

Hills claimed that Aptivia will speed analog design reuse by allowing apprentice designers to cut and paste material from projects created by more senior designers. "This will cut the five-year productivity gap in hal f," he said.

While programming links are available for such popular design tools as Cadence Design Systems Inc.'s Artist, Cadence's Spectre and Synopsys Inc.'s VCS tools, the Aptivia tool set is billed as a complimentary environment.

Aptivia's strength is in behavioral modeling tools that allow designers to create models of analog functions, and in analysis display modules that allow designers to rapidly visualize the impact of design changes. (The Aptivia results analysis display, called RAD, will be rolled out later this month. It will plot measured values, with annotations and anchors, against input signals.)

A test console built into Aptivia allows designers to display the current status of all simulations and measures in one location. Designers can view measured results, waveforms or operating points for any of their simulations. The test console also allows any number of simulations to run concurrently.

Pricing for the Antrim Aptivia tool set starts at $35,000.

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