Analogue and mixed-signal designs are fast becoming significant in System-On-Chip (SoC) designs as digital computational cores need to interface with the real world. Cellular phones, magnetic disk drives, speech recognition hardware and other 'digital' innovations in fact rely on a core of analogue circuitry. Mature digital CAD tools competently handle the digital portions of SoC designs. This is not true for analogue and mixed-signals components, still designed manually using time-consuming techniques. A good top-down design methodology can drastically reduce the design time of analogue components in SoCs and allow comprehensive functionality verification. This paper contains a critical survey of current design processes and tools, a top-down design case study and introduces MIX-SYN, a new platform for fast-tracking exploration and design time for the analogue and mixed-signals design industry.

Date Published: 5 January 2006
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 6035, Microelectronics: Design, Technology, and Packaging II, 603525 (5 January 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.637866

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6035:
Microelectronics: Design, Technology, and Packaging II
Alex J. Hariz, Editor(s)