Leveraging designer's intent: A path toward simpler analog CAD tools

Abstract

Leveraging the Boolean intent of digital circuits has enabled a wide set of CAD tools that helped increase the productivity of digital designers. To increase analog designers' productivity requires a similar encapsulation of designer's intent for analog circuits. We argue that linear system models serve this role for almost all analog circuits, while the variables of these models may be in some transformed domains, rather than being the direct voltage/current waveforms of the circuits. We show how using these models enable new ways to design, optimize, and validate mixed-signal circuits. Even systems that reach steady states only in a stochastic sense can be analyzed as linear systems. Then a remaining issue is to ensure that the non-linear circuit reaches the intended "linear" operating point during start-up, which can be addressed by global convergence analysis.

Analog System High-Level Synthesis for Energy-Efficient Reconfigurable Computing

“…Macromodeling techniques, such as making a simplified algebraic or numerically simple ODE circuit model, remain a key framework for analog design [50,51]. Some techniques are coupled with digital tools for joint analog and digital system verification [52,53]. Custom analog IC design has little additional tool support other than low-level IC design tools.…”

Enabling Energy-Efficient Physical Computing through Analog Abstraction and IP Reuse

“…Models look to utilize generalized, low-order polynomials around a single fixed operating point [33][34][35][36][37], and some models utilize the nonlinear dynamics of the transistors [29,[38][39][40]. These techniques often are coupled with tool design approach, particularly joint verification of digital and analog systems [41][42][43][44].…”

Finding All DC Operating Points Using Interval Arithmetic Based Verification Algorithms

“…DC operating point analysis is a crucial first step for simulation, analysis, and verification of analog and mixed-signal circuits. As described in [20], most analog circuits are intended to have linear transfer functions when analyzed in the appropriate domains. This linear behaviour is exhibited when the circuit is at its intended operating point.…”