Nascentric, chip design and analysis co., raises $7.2M from Intel Capital, others

Nascentric, a San Jose, Calif., chip design company focused on providing “Fast-SPICE” analysis tools, said it has raised a $7.2 million third round of financing.

SPICE stands for “Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis” and is used to verify whether an integrated circuit will function correctly before fabrication.  Each IC fabrication attempt can be expensive, and it often takes multiple attempts to get it right, so companies use SPICE as much as possible.

The problem with SPICE is that it is so slow that it is difficult to use it on circuits much bigger than a few thousand transistors, making it useless for many applications

Fast-SPICE, however, does intelligent approximations that enable it to handle hundreds of thousands to millions of transistors.

A competitor to Nascentric is Synopsys’ HSIM.  Others that claim to have Fast-SPICE are Berkeley Design Automation and Magma Design Automation (FineSIM is their product name), although Nascentric says it is confident it can beat their run-times.

Nascentric’s VP of marketing, Dino Caporossi, tells VentureBeat its product is at least twice as fast as Synopsys’ product.

Intel Capital is a new investor. Existing investors Austin Ventures, Silverton Partners, Needham Capital and EDA veteran Jim Solomon also participated in the round.

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