A ground-up redesign delivering revolutionary speed, accuracy, and functionality
Simic is a functional/gate/switch level simulator with capabilities far beyond other simulation products from commercial vendors or academia. Starting from a blank sheet of paper, Genashor created the next generation simulator that delivers simulation results in seconds that previously took hours.
While building on decades of simulation experience from RCA's MIMIC, Simic is a complete ground-up implementation. The engine delivers orders of magnitude faster performance than its predecessor, with enhanced functionality and even greater accuracy. What took MIMIC hours to simulate, Simic accomplishes in seconds.
Simic has been used by companies, universities, and individuals around the world, both as a superb design teaching tool and to create real designs with an incredible first-working silicon success record.
Working with the University of Manchester in England, Simic was proven to be the only logic simulator that could accurately model asynchronous design elements and discover critical hazards in designs using these models. This groundbreaking work culminated in the paper presented at Async94: Tools for Validating Asynchronous Digital Circuits.
This collaboration demonstrated Simic's unique capability to handle the complex timing requirements of clockless designs, opening new possibilities for low-power and high-performance circuit architectures.
For years the logic simulation industry had been focusing on performance to the exclusion of all else. Simic delivers exceptional performance without cutting corners in accuracy and functionality.
No other commercial gate simulator properly models wire-tied drivers. Without this, it is impossible to trust the timing at bus structures. The bus-hold circuit, popular in modern circuit architectures, can actually result in a steady-state error at the bus that is left undetected by other simulators. Simic gets it right.
Simic includes a suite of built-in hazard analysis that can detect many potential problems (such as essential hazards) that are completely ignored by other simulators. When this analysis is combined with Simic's sophisticated interactive debugging capabilities, users can quickly pinpoint problematic areas before they become silicon problems.
Beyond circuit verification, Simic has fault analysis and grading capabilities that can automatically and properly classify faults such as clock and reset faults as Detected or Undetected. No more hours or days trying to generate tests for faults that were incorrectly marked as potential detections.
Simic includes a built-in tester emulation mode. This allows test engineers to debug their test programs in the simulator, rather than taking expensive testing time away from manufacturing. The emulator can be used with the fault analysis to give an accurate picture of fault coverage based on the actual test program.
Simic is remarkably efficient in memory utilization, typically using 50x less memory than comparable simulators while delivering better simulation throughput.
Real-World Impact: One client who was forced to use a large server to run one simulation at a time found that Simic could run on the smaller workstations on each engineer's desk. Design productivity went up more than 10-fold when Simic was used.
Orders of magnitude faster than previous generation tools. Hours reduced to seconds with no compromise in accuracy.
Proper modeling of wire-tied drivers, bus-hold circuits, and complex timing scenarios that other simulators miss.
Built-in analysis to detect essential hazards and timing issues before they become silicon problems.
Automatic fault classification and grading, saving hours of manual test generation effort.
Debug test programs in simulation, providing accurate fault coverage analysis without tying up manufacturing resources.
50x less memory usage than comparable simulators, enabling desktop workstation deployment.
For more details on Simic's unique capabilities:
The MIMIC Logic Simulator was released by RCA in 1978 and soon totally replaced breadboarding as the method for designing ICs throughout RCA. MIMIC's reputation spread internationally and RCA began offering IC design services via its new ASIC design division with the slogan: "If MIMIC says it works, RCA will guarantee it works." The division achieved an over 99% success rate.
Over sixty companies in locations all over the globe used these simulation tools for IC design. When Harris closed the division's doors in 1989, Genashor Corp was created by the developers of MIMIC and many other CAE tools within RCA.
Simic represents the next generation - a complete redesign that takes simulation to an entirely new level of speed, accuracy, and capability.
For more information about Simic, please contact: support@genashor.com