GoldenGate 4.2.X Product Release

This page provides information for the following GoldenGate product releases:

• GoldenGate 4.2.3
• GoldenGate 4.2.2
• GoldenGate 4.2.1
• GoldenGate 4.2.0
• GoldenGate 4.2.X Operating Systems

GoldenGate 4.2.3 - Improving capabilities and cost of System to Silicon Verification

GoldenGate 4.3.0 continues Keysight’s commitment to improving the speed and accuracy of RFIC simulations while reducing the total cost of ownership for advanced system to silicon verification. The GoldenGate 4.3.0 release includes:

• Parallel Corner and Monte Carlo simulation license option: New Parallel corner and Monte Carlo license option provides a cost effective alternative for dedicated corner and advanced verification simulations. This new option augments the existing Quad-Pack licenses to give RFIC design and CAD managers the flexibility they need to optimize their simulation budgets. GoldenGate is now the only tool of its kind available today that allows both multiple simulations from a single software license (Quad-Pack) and dedicated simulation licenses for corner and Monte Carlo based verification.
• New Envelope Noise Analysis: GoldenGate can now include noise contributions in envelope and fast envelope transient simulations. As opposed to other techniques, this implementation does not suffer from potential time domain numerical integration errors and can evaluate both the noise and desired signal contributions in the same simulation.
• Jivaro for GoldenGate extracted netlist reduction tool: Jivaro for GoldenGate
• New Time-Domain preconditioner for Harmonic Balance: Harmonic-balance simulation has traditionally suffered from poor convergence and high memory consumption when faced with strongly nonlinear waveforms found in digital-type circuitry, such as frequency dividers. The new time-domain preconditioner for harmonic balance provides GoldenGate with the speed of shooting methods combined with the high accuracy of harmonic balance for this type of application. This augments GoldenGates industry-leading preconditioners for traditional radio circuits with a new time-domain preconditioner specifically for use with strongly nonlinear circuits.

Standard-complaint wireless sources and sinks for GoldenGate libraries from Keysight’s Ptolemy system simulator, including transmit/receive waveforms for 3GPPFDD (LTE), 802.16 (WiMAX/WiMAN), TDSCMDA, and 802.11(WiFi). GoldenGate also supports custom, user-defined wireless sources.

• New Threaded Transient Convolution capability delivering a 2-5x improvement in speed and additional frequency dependent element support.
• 2-5x improvement in memory consumption and simulation start-up times for Monte Carlo analysis, simulations using binned PDKs or large circuit extracted views.
• New GoldenGate remote host capability maximizes the use of local and remote hardware across different machine and OS configurations.

• and more!

GoldenGate 4.2.2
""Expanded Simulation Coverage""

GoldenGate is an all-purpose RFIC simulator. It performs the majority of the simulations needed for the design and verification of an RFIC transceiver. GoldenGate works with the Cadence Analog Design Environment tool.

In the GoldenGate 4.2.2 release, new support is added for: Oscillator Analysis in SSNA, the “flkmod” parameter in the MOSFET BSIM4 model. The release also includes fixes for some problems that occur in large Monte Carlo simulations.

GoldenGate Tools is a group of Keysight tools that have been adapted to work with the GoldenGate RFIC simulator. They include Momentum, Data Display, and a small group of Ptolemy sources.

GoldenGate Tools 4.2.2 release includes some improvements in Data Display tools: intelligent symbol spacing on traces, improved page management with tabs, and CSV data export; and the following improvements in Momentum tools: layout pre-processor that eliminates meshing errors, increased capability to simulate very large structures (6 times larger than previously possible) with memory usage reduction by 50%, 5x increased simulation speed, and multi-core multi-threading for matrix load and matrix solve.

GoldenGate 4.2.1

GoldenGate 4.2.1 includes new support for the 3-tone oscillator analysis, improvements in the transient sampling algorithm and accuracy of the noise model for the MOSFET level 903 devices.

GoldenGate 4.2.0

GoldenGate 4.2.0 provides improved simulation throughput and expanded RF/Mixed-Signal simulation coverage needed for RFIC designers to discover problems early and prevent costly re-spins. This release provides:

5x speed improvement in transient simulations

• With 2x to 4x improvements on single-core computers and typically 5x for quad-core computers, reducing transient simulation times allows for more simulations runs for more simulation coverage without compromising tight development schedules

New mixed-signal simulation capabilities include:

• Digital State Sweeping (DSS) provides an automated solution to the problem of sweeping an RF design through its many digital control states. DSS automates operational verification of the control states and provides interface and connectivity testing as well as digital-RF connectivity debugging, allowing digital and RF teams to work concurrently.
• Mixed Signal transient co-simulations of RF and Verilog-AMS digital circuits with third party digital simulator.

Standard-complaint wireless sources from Keysight’s Ptolemy System Simulator

• transmit/receive waveforms for 802.11(WiFi)
• 802.16 (WiMAX/WiMAN)
• TDSCMDA
• 3GPPFDD
• custom, user-defined wireless sources

Improved Monte Carlo simulation throughput

• 5-10x fewer trials using Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) and Hammersley Sequence Sampling (HSS)

GoldenGate 4.2.x Operating Systems

For the GoldenGate 4.2 Release, RHEL 4 will be the primary operating system (OS) for GoldenGate. RHEL4 provides the needed facilities for many of the new enhanced features of GG4.2 – such as: multi-threading (key for 5x transient speed-up), support for QMCC & parallel simulations -- and for new upcoming features. Additionally with ADS 2008, GGTools 4.2 (DDS, Momentum, and Ptolemy) is not supported on some older OSs.

What about RHEL 3 and Solaris?

• With limited support, GG4.2 is the last major release for RHEL3 & Solaris
• The first few follow-up releases until October 1, 2008 will provide limited support for RHEL 3 & Solaris
• With GG4.2, some features will not be available on these OSs.

Not supported on GG4.2:

• RHEL3: GGTools 4.2, Ptolemy wireless sources, parallel simulation/QMCC, Verilog AMS co-sim & multi-threading
• Solaris 8 & 9: GGTools 4.2, Ptolemy wireless sources, 64 bit operation , Verilog AMS co-sim & multi-threading
• Solaris 10: 64 bit operation , Verilog AMS co-sim & multi-threading

GoldenGate will continue to support license servers on RHEL3 & Solaris.
In conjunction with rest of the Keysight EEsof EDA products, support for RHEL5 is being planned for 2009.

View other GoldenGate Product Versions.