CUSTOMIZED SIMULATION TOOL FOR MIXED ANALOG-DIGITAL INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

Abstract

In the past few years, mixed analog-digital IC designs have become increasingly popular and the complexity of these chips has been growing. However, one of the major bottlenecks for achieving low cost and high quality design is the lack of simulation tools. Currently, designers need to manually split the design into analog and digital portions which are verified separately using analog and digital simulators respectively. There is no easy and robust way to verify the mixed analog-digital IC designs with one simulator. Hence, we are going to propose a new methodology to simulate a mixed analog-digital IC designs with one simulator. To achieve the proposed methodology we have defined the analog definitions in digital domain library. This  library definition was integrated into the standard definition library, results in we have provided a simple method to use HDL definition in EDA tool such as ModelSim PE 10.1b.  As we are using a single tool for both analog and mixed signal design IC’s the tool portability or optimization of the tool had been achieved for mixed analog-digital integrated circuits.