HSPICE: 40 years after its birth, three self-innovations, and the gold standard for circuit simulation

Innovation is often the only way to success. "Innovate or die" is widely circulated in the technology industry. Only organizations that can lead innovation can thrive. The same is true for technology, and HSPICE® circuit simulation technology illustrates this point well.

HSPICE technology is not standing still as the industry's gold standard. Over the years, HSPICE has evolved as simulation has become more difficult. The major waves of HSPICE evolution have played a significant role in the development of the chip industry.

HSPICE is now celebrating its 40th birthday, and today we will discuss how HSPICE will continue to reinvent itself to help developers design higher-performance chips.

Three waves of innovation in HSPICE

Circuit simulation is critical in ensuring that chips operate as expected. After all, we can’t afford critical applications like vehicle braking systems, robotic surgical equipment, or 24/7 production lines to fail due to chip issues. As chip designs increase in complexity, new simulation challenges emerge. To meet these challenges, HSPICE technology must also keep pace.

HSPICE started in the 1980s as an analog circuit simulator based on SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Focus) technology developed at the University of California, Berkeley. HSPICE is a superior commercial version of SPICE (originally commercialized by Meta-Software, now part of Synopsys). By simulating circuits before the chip is taped out, developers can verify operations at the transistor level. With SPICE simulation, developers can accurately predict the behavior of designs and estimate how component changes affect performance. During this period, integrated circuits were relatively small, and each contained a small number of analog components.

The digital revolution arrives

With the advent of digital components, HSPICE ushered in the first wave of innovation and gradually became the gold standard for the characterization of standard cell libraries. In analog integrated circuits, HSPICE technology is used to simulate the entire circuit. On the other hand, digital developers will use standard cells such as synthesis, location and routing in the design step. Foundries use HSPICE to simulate and describe these standard cells before building cell libraries for implementing digital designs. 

From analog circuit simulators to today's hyperconverged design solutions

With the advent of faster and more complex high-speed IO and memory interfaces, HSPICE ushered in a second wave of innovation. Suppose you have a motherboard with a microprocessor and DRAM. The interface transmission signal between the two should be very fast and can be implemented directly on the motherboard, so it is crucial to analyze the signal and power integrity of the PCB. HSPICE meets the challenge by integrating advanced signal and power integrity modeling capabilities, becoming the de facto standard for discovering signal integrity and power integrity issues. HSPICE can effectively evaluate and identify errors that occur in billions of bit transmissions, and is an ideal simulation solution that can accelerate the creation and analysis of designs with complex high-speed interfaces.

Today, we live in the era of hyperconverged chip design. In this era, scale and system complexity are marked by multiple technologies, protocols, and architectures that are combined in large-scale, highly complex, and interdependent designs. This evolution has pushed circuit simulation into a field where accurate modeling, robust algorithms, and strong compatibility are the keys to success. In addition, large heterogeneous system-in-package designs urgently require complex, multi-dimensional analysis with improved results quality, results time, and results cost.

Ensuring these hyper-converged chips work as expected presents entirely new challenges. In addition to scale and system complexity, there are scope complexity challenges, with on-chip and off-chip components to consider. For example, 3DIC emerged during this period, with even more complex signal integrity and power integrity requirements as signals move between different dies connected by through-silicon vias (TSVs) and bond wires. In this third wave of innovation, HSPICE technology has become a bridge between the on-chip and off-chip worlds that no other simulation technology can match.

The Gold Standard in Circuit Simulation

The evolution of HSPICE is a smart, machine-driven SPICE simulation with advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms and a new name and packaging. HSPICE is now PrimeSim HSPICE, part of Synopsys' PrimeSim™ Continuum. PrimeSim HSPICE remains the gold standard for circuit simulation with capabilities such as analog simulation, standard cell and memory characterization, and signal integrity analysis. The new ML algorithms in the PrimeSim HSPICE solution enable developers to quickly analyze the impact of changes and identify weaknesses in complex advanced node designs in a cost-effective manner.

Where will HSPICE go?

HSPICE has successfully reinvented itself time and again, so where does the future of HSPICE technology lie? Looking ahead, here are three key areas to watch:

• Core performance improvements enable more robust implementation of accurate SPICE simulations, helping developers achieve results faster

• Technologies to help developers improve overall design coverage
  

• ML-driven analysis flow helps developers analyze weak links, optimize design parameters, and effectively debug when problems arise
  

When HSPICE technology was born 40 years ago, developers were still busy with desktop terminals and calculations were performed on remote servers. Today, many EDA tasks, including circuit simulation, are performed in the cloud, and PrimeSim HSPICE has been optimized to run on leading cloud platforms.

Developers' goal is to create the best and fastest chips, so they need better and faster circuit simulation tools. Today's chips are more complex than ever before, but HSPICE technology has adapted to this complexity time and time again, always providing developers with fast and accurate gold standard simulation solutions that they can trust.