General goals

The goal of this project was to increase the design productivity and the design quality of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit designs. This goal has been reached by the development (up to a ready-to-commercialize product) of tools that assist the designer in exploration of design alternatives and in his interactive circuit sizing, as well as by using optimization techniques for fine-tuning and improving the design robustness. Different techniques have been explored and combined in one integrated environment, including both links to numerical simulators and symbolic modeling tools. Both the steps of circuit modeling and design strategy derivation have been investigated. A library of basic functions used by the tools and required for demonstrator applications have been developed. The reuse of design knowledge has been supported by a dedicated browsing system.

Technical and strategic relevance

Proven automated design-flows from a high level design description to the final layout exist for the digital part whereas a lot of engineering effort has to be put into the design of analog circuitry. The work of this project covered most of the design steps for analog circuits: top-down design refinement, sizing, optimization, design centering and characterization. The resulting tools and design methodology will greatly improve the productivity in the design of analog circuits.

The main focus of this project has been on top-down design refinement and on sizing. Top-down design refinement will reduce the overall design time by reducing the number of redesigns. Sizing/characterization is the most time consuming step of the analog circuit design flow and most promising to achieve a relevant reduction in design time. At the same time design quality can be improved.

• ITWM developed "Analog Insydes", a commercial tool for linear and non-linear symbolic analysis.
• TEMIC´s "DREAM (Design Reuse Experiment for Analogue Modules)", a proprietary intelligent documentation and browsing system to facilitate the reuse of existing analogue design IP.
• Bosch and ComCAD have successfully developed a complete sizing environment, now officially known as "Size!", that will be capable of interfacing with a variety of commercial and company-specific design systems.

Results

The following section is taken from the MEDEA press release September 28, 2000.

The rapid growth of the communications and automotive systems markets and Europe's leadership position in these markets have created massive demand for microelectronics and for advanced analogue/digital design tools. SADE partners ITWM and TEMIC Semiconductor focussed on a top down refinement strategy to minimise the number of redesigns required. This decomposition process deals with the sizing and characterisation of individual components, simultaneous optimisation for performance, process yield and robustness. The end result is a sized circuit that forms the input for the final layout stage and subsequent implementation on silicon.

By realising the full benefits of automation, it is envisaged that this entire cycle could be compressed into a timeframe of one month. SADE´s top-down refinement process employs both numerical simulation and more sophisticated symbolic analysis for circuit modelling.

Results of this very successful cooperation of Institutes, SMEs and larger groups include:

Together, the tools resulting from SADE will narrow the design automation gap between analogue and digital domains. Analogue and mixed-signal circuitry is a European strength, and the results of the SADE project will ensure the continuing competitiveness of the European microelectronics industry in this field.