Agilent Technologies Inc. announced its work with NVIDIA to accelerate signal integrity simulations using NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)-based Graphics Processing Units (GPU). The association is expected to yield the commercial release of a GPU-enabled Advanced Design System (ADS) Transient Convolution Simulator that will allow signal integrity designers to run these simulations dramatically faster than was previously possible.

"We're very pleased to be working with NVIDIA to both speed up their design cycles today and to help our customers solve their signal integrity problems much faster in the future," said Colin Warwick, product marketing manager with Agilent's EEsof EDA division. "In this case, NVIDIA itself is the lead customer for this new blending of technologies."

At high data rates, signal integrity engineers must take into account physical phenomena like impedance mismatch, reflections, electromagnetic coupling, crosstalk and microwave frequency attenuation due to the skin effect and dielectric loss tangent. NVIDIA's CUDA-based computation acceleration hardware is expected to accelerate Agilent's ADS Transient-Convolution Simulator, allowing designers to perform fast "what-if" design-space exploration using circuit-level models that can be verified against measured data and EM simulation of the artwork.

Common applications for Agilent's ADS Transient-Convolution Simulator that will benefit from the CUDA-based GPU acceleration include design and verification of chip-to-chip multigigabit/s serial links. These are found in almost all consumer and enterprise digital products produced today, from laptop computers to data center servers, telecommunication switching centers and Internet routers. The accelerated simulation will help manufacturers of these products improve their time-to-market by arriving at an optimum design through rapid and complete exploration of the design space and avoiding costly and time-consuming prototype iterations.

"By employing the CUDA development environment to harness the parallel architecture of the GPU, Agilent has significantly enhanced and accelerated its tools, which solve critical simulation problems for NVIDIA," said Tommy Lee, vice president of System Design and Manufacturing, NVIDIA. "Using Agilent's new CUDA-enabled tools, our engineering team was able to simulate our data path in parallel. We achieved a 14x improvement in simulation time, sped up our NPI process and further increased our design velocity."