Realizing Silicon in the New Frontier of Mixed-Signal Design
Realizing Silicon in the New Frontier of Mixed-Signal Design
From watching mobile digital TV to curling up with an eBook to getting real-time traffic reports from the car’s navigation system, consumers expect electronics to do more—in more places—than ever before. To meet this demand for functionality, mobility, and on-demand access, engineering teams must create larger chips that combine digital signal processing and analog circuitry. Whether it’s a small IP block, a medium-sized IC, or an enormous SoC built at 65nm, the intricacies of these mixed-signal designs pose significant challenges to realizing silicon.
With IP, the current trend is to reuse or buy mixed-signal IP blocks such as communication interfaces and data converters for integration into ICs and SoCs. This requires a methodology that enables IP reuse and cost-effective IP integration into chips. Mixed-signal ICs, whether they are analog-intensive/standard or digital-intensive/application-specific (DSPs, sensors, radios), likewise require a methodology to efficiently integrate IP blocks, reduce unit cost, speed time to market, and ensure quality.
But today’s high-performance, highly integrated systems on chip (SoCs) are the new frontier of mixed-signal design. These mixed-signal SoCs comprise digital-intensive chips built on advanced nodes with multiple microprocessor cores, memory blocks, and audio/video and touch interfaces. Each of these complex chips has billions of devices, runs at Gigahertz speeds, and consumes huge amounts of power.
More than ever, engineering teams need an integrated and interoperable methodology to realize silicon that meets the combined requirements for lightning-fast speed, ultra low power, high yield, lower cost, and shorter schedule. Realization of these complex mixed-signal SoCs is possible with Cadence® technology.
Moving Beyond the Divide-and-Conquer Approach
Cadence advocates a more efficient approach to mixed-signal design, one that leverages an integrated mixed-signal methodology in which early design planning, front-end design, functional verification, physical implementation, and packaging are shared responsibilities between analog and digital teams. Incorporating such a mixed-signal methodology from the top down will boost productivity of the combined engineering team, help management hit aggressive market windows, and increase profitability.