The problem with timing simulators is that for circuits that contain analog they often get the wrong answer. If you are only interested in IR/EM analysis, they might be okay because in those situations you only need to approximate the behavior of the circuit to get roughly the right current levels, voltage levels, and operating frequencies. On the other hand, it can take a lot of time and effort to get them set up properly and become confident in their results. And in the end, they generally do not provide much speed-up for analog circuits.
A better option is the accelerated full circuit simulators, such as Spectre-APS and BDA's AFS. Presumably, you are already using these.
You are going to have a hard time doing better than default settings combined with errpreset=liberal unless there is something specific about your circuit that you can exploit, though what that might be I cannot imagine at the moment.
Really, only modeling offers any promise. And it offers a lot of promise when done well:
- You develop the model and so control the approximations (unlike with timing simulations you understand the limitations of your simulations).
- You can choose any speed up you want by the way you write your models (100x to 1000x speed ups are typical and 1,000,000x speed ups are possible in the right situations with the right models whereas timing simulation usually only provides 3-10x).
- The simulations can start before the circuits are designed.
However modeling does require special skills and more time and effort than most people are willing or able to expend, so they often just do what they can with transistor level simulations, which is generally very limited, and then they move on.
There is a very clear trend in the industry towards the use of models for functional verification, with most all of the major companies heading that way, so I expect the reticence your colleagues are expressing will eventually diminish.
-Ken