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Nascentric Announces OmegaSim GX
Uses NVIDIA Tesla Computing Processors to Provide Unprecedented Speed and Accuracy: Nascentric, an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) company focused on providing the fastest, highest capacity, and most accurate Fast-SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) simulation and analysis tools, unveiled OmegaSim GX, the world’s first hardware-accelerated SPICE simulator. OmegaSim GX harnesses the raw computational power of NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to provide the highest-performance transistor-level simulation with virtually no loss in accuracy. 
OmegaSim GX is based on NVIDIA’s Tesla hardware platform that provides a massively parallel multi-threaded architecture. The platform is available as a 128-core PCI Express add-in card, a 256-core desk-side or a 512-core rack-mounted system configuration. Nascentric developed OmegaSim GX using NVIDIA’s CUDA C-compiler development environment. Nascentric will demonstrate OmegaSim GX at NVIDIA’s financial analyst meeting being held today at their Santa Clara, California headquarters. “Electronic Design Automation offers an exceptional opportunity to exploit Tesla’s parallelism,” said Andy Keane, general manager of GPU computing at NVIDIA Corporation. “NVIDIA is pushing the envelope in core processor development for graphics and computing, so we are intimately familiar with the SPICE simulation bottleneck that occurs during chip verification. We are pleased to see Nascentric take advantage of our raw processing power to solve this issue.” “We are very delighted to partner with NVIDIA to offer a ground-breaking solution for complex circuit simulation. Nascentric can rightly claim technology leadership in GPU-enabled SPICE simulation,” said Rahm Shastry, president and CEO of Nascentric. “Nascentric was the first company to announce and deliver a multi-threaded Fast-SPICE simulator last year and we are now the first to deliver hardware accelerated Fast-SPICE simulation technology.” “Using NVIDIA’s Tesla platform we can perform circuit simulations in minutes to hours that would previously have taken hours, days and weeks,” said Dr. John Croix, Nascentric founder and CTO. “This enables us to perform accurate SPICE simulations on large mixed-signal designs that would otherwise be prohibitive.” SPICE simulators are used for detailed circuit analysis, particularly after an Integrated Circuit (IC) is placed and routed. SPICE simulation of even a small, but critical portion of an IC can take weeks or months to complete. Faster SPICE simulators, often referred to as Fast-SPICE, are typically one or two orders of magnitude faster than plain SPICE simulators, but they achieve that additional performance at the expense of accuracy. Earlier this year, Nascentric announced OmegaSim, the industry’s first multi-threaded Fast-SPICE simulator for mixed-signal designs. OmegaSim offered ten times the performance of other Fast-SPICE tools, without sacrificing accuracy, and handling in excess of tens of millions of devices. Now, using NVIDIA’s Tesla GPUs, OmegaSim GX achieves an additional order of magnitude improvement in performance without compromising accuracy. Pricing and Availability North American pricing for OmegaSim GX software is $25,000 per year or $2,500 per month. The minimum subscription commitment is 10 months. Hardware is separately priced and must be purchased from NVIDIA, its partners or resellers. The beta release is scheduled for May 10, 2008 and the first customer shipment is planned for July 7, 2008.
OmegaSim GX is based on NVIDIA’s Tesla hardware platform that provides a massively parallel multi-threaded architecture. The platform is available as a 128-core PCI Express add-in card, a 256-core desk-side or a 512-core rack-mounted system configuration. Nascentric developed OmegaSim GX using NVIDIA’s CUDA C-compiler development environment. Nascentric will demonstrate OmegaSim GX at NVIDIA’s financial analyst meeting being held today at their Santa Clara, California headquarters. “Electronic Design Automation offers an exceptional opportunity to exploit Tesla’s parallelism,” said Andy Keane, general manager of GPU computing at NVIDIA Corporation. “NVIDIA is pushing the envelope in core processor development for graphics and computing, so we are intimately familiar with the SPICE simulation bottleneck that occurs during chip verification. We are pleased to see Nascentric take advantage of our raw processing power to solve this issue.” “We are very delighted to partner with NVIDIA to offer a ground-breaking solution for complex circuit simulation. Nascentric can rightly claim technology leadership in GPU-enabled SPICE simulation,” said Rahm Shastry, president and CEO of Nascentric. “Nascentric was the first company to announce and deliver a multi-threaded Fast-SPICE simulator last year and we are now the first to deliver hardware accelerated Fast-SPICE simulation technology.” “Using NVIDIA’s Tesla platform we can perform circuit simulations in minutes to hours that would previously have taken hours, days and weeks,” said Dr. John Croix, Nascentric founder and CTO. “This enables us to perform accurate SPICE simulations on large mixed-signal designs that would otherwise be prohibitive.” SPICE simulators are used for detailed circuit analysis, particularly after an Integrated Circuit (IC) is placed and routed. SPICE simulation of even a small, but critical portion of an IC can take weeks or months to complete. Faster SPICE simulators, often referred to as Fast-SPICE, are typically one or two orders of magnitude faster than plain SPICE simulators, but they achieve that additional performance at the expense of accuracy. Earlier this year, Nascentric announced OmegaSim, the industry’s first multi-threaded Fast-SPICE simulator for mixed-signal designs. OmegaSim offered ten times the performance of other Fast-SPICE tools, without sacrificing accuracy, and handling in excess of tens of millions of devices. Now, using NVIDIA’s Tesla GPUs, OmegaSim GX achieves an additional order of magnitude improvement in performance without compromising accuracy. Pricing and Availability North American pricing for OmegaSim GX software is $25,000 per year or $2,500 per month. The minimum subscription commitment is 10 months. Hardware is separately priced and must be purchased from NVIDIA, its partners or resellers. The beta release is scheduled for May 10, 2008 and the first customer shipment is planned for July 7, 2008.