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Platform helps you discover mixed-signal designs

By Gabe Moretti -- EDN, 10/16/2003

To take advantage of growing market segments, such as automotive and communications, designers must integrate both digital and analog functions onto one IC. Analog and digital design represent disciplines with different design requirements, which teams with diverse backgrounds must fulfill. Until recently, analog functions and digital functions required different semiconductor processes and separate ICs. The EDA tools either team uses differ considerably. Analog design is still mostly entered through schematics, whereas digital-IC design relies almost entirely on HDLs (hardware-description languages). Joining the two design methods to produce an integrated system poses both compu-tational and user-interface challenges.

Synopsys' Discovery-AMS is a unified environment that provides both the necessary simulation performance and the integration, including mixed-HDL simulation, mixed-signal simulation, system-level verification, formal-analysis methods, and test tools. At the core of the Discovery-AMS tool, engineers will find the VCS simulator engine for digital designs and the NanoSim and HSPICE engines for analog designs. The engines allow designers to use Verilog, VHDL, Spice, Verilog-A, and Verilog-AMS. Accellera is currently standardizing Verilog-AMS. Designers have the choice of language to meet the level of abstraction to suit the design phase they are working on. The engines use a common user interface. Once engineers input the design netlist, they can choose the level of abstraction for blocks in the design and set up the simulation for optimal trade-offs between accuracy and execution speed. The unified waveform display with built-in measurement functions provides a familiar debugging environment to both digital and analog designers.

Engineers will find it helpful that Synopsys has integrated NanoSim with the Star-RCXT parasitic-extraction tool. This package allows designers to isolate and analyze nets to study the impact of physical characteristics on system performance. Engineers can also use this function on digital nets to evaluate the impact of layout choices on timing constraints. Discovery-AMS is part of the Synopsys Discovery Verification Platform.

US list price for a one year term license for Discovery-AMS starts at $122,000. For more information visit www.synopsys.com.