Me and my colleagues were discussing how can we improve the speed of “spectre” simulations in Cadence especially when we want to run post parasitics extracted simulations. I have been using ADE-XL for the past year and definitely it is a very nice upgrade to have from ADE-L (but it takes up a lot of licenses using the Cadence token system). So in ADE-XL there is an option of multiprocessing but is limited to simulating different corners of the same circuit simultaneously. Remember that just defining the maximum number of processors is not the best choice, you are going to slow down your computer from operating anything in the background even the Linux operating system. Anyways, I am pretty sure from my experience that Cadence ADE-XL does not accelerates the solution of one single circuit for a single corner. So do we have any other option? As we discussed, we came to the conclusion that the multi-processing ability does not appear in ADE-L for “spectre”. It does appear for “ultrasim” simulator which is supposedly partitioning the circuits based on analog and digital signals. Similarly another simulator known as “aps” (marketed as Cadence spectre Accelerated Parallel Simulator) which is relatively a recent product, has substantial improvement over “spectre“. Still whenever in mixed-signal circuits the clock limited blocks are the biggest source of slowing down the overall simulations and it is just impossible to do post parastics extracted simulation for such large chips.