Hardware Assisted Electronic Circuit Simulation System

In Phase I, EM Photonics demonstrated the viability of using a reconfigurable hardware approach to accelerating the simulation of electronic circuits based on their electromagnetic properties. In Phase II, this technology will be used to create a solver capable of analyzing mixed signal circuits 64 times faster than is currently available from equivalent software. The resulting device will shrink design cycles and allow for more rigorous analysis of the user’s problem. Consequently, devices that previously required two months to simulate, can now be run in less than a day. This advance will directly translate to products reaching the market faster and will allow for the modeling of more complex devices. The key to this technology is the use of a reconfigurable computing platform build around a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). This allows for the creation of a device capable of rivaling the speeds of large Beowulf clusters while maintaining the size of a standard desktop PC. This proposal contains details on the enabling technologies, our success to date, and our plans for realizing the final system.