Georges Gielen

Geert Van der Plas

Willy M.C. Sansen

Willy Sansen

This text addresses the design methodologies and CAD tools available for the systematic design and design automation of analogue integrated circuits. Two complementary approaches discussed increase analogue design productivity, demonstrated throughout using design times of the different design experiments undertaken.

A Computer-Aided Design and Synthesis Environment for Analog Integrated Circuits

Piet Wambacq

John Gerrits

This unique book provides an overview of the current state of the art and very recent research results that have been achieved as part of the Low-Power Initiative of the European Union, in the field of analogue, RF and mixed-signal design methodologies and CAD tools.

Low-Power Design Techniques and CAD Tools for Analog and RF Integrated Circuits

Luis Hernandez-Corporales

Pieter Rombouts

This book demonstrates why highly-digital CMOS time-encoding analog-to-digital converters incorporating voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) and time-to-digital converters (TDCs) are a good alternative to traditional switched-capacitor S-D modulators for power-efficient sensor, biomedical and communications applications. The authors describe the theoretical foundations and design methodology of such time-based ADCs from the basics to the latest developments. While most analog designers might notice some resemblance to PLL design, the book clearly highlights the differences to standard PLL circuit design and illustrates the design methodology with practical circuit design examples. Describes in detail the design methodology for CMOS time-encoding analog-to-digital converters that can be integrated along with digital logic in a nanometer System on Chip; Assists analog designers with the necessary change in design paradigm, highlighting differences between designing time-based ADCs and traditional analog circuits like switched-capacitor converters and PLLs; Uses a highly-visual, tutorial approach to the topic, including many practical examples of techniques introduced.

Principles, Architectures and Circuits

Time-encoding VCO-ADCs for Integrated Systems-on-Chip

Stéphane Donnay

Driven by applications such as telecommunications, computing and consumer/multimedia and facilitated by the progress in CMOS ULSI technology, the microelectronics IC market is characterized by an ever-increasing level of integration complexity. Today complete systems, that previously occupied one or more boards, are integrated on a few chips or even on one single multi-million transistor chip - a so called System-on-Chip (SoC). Although most functions in such integrated systems are implemented with digital or digital signal processing circuitry, the analog circuits needed at the interface between the electronic system and the continuous-valued outside world are also being integrated on the same die for reasons of cost and performance. Unfortunately, the integration of both analog & RF circuits and digital circuits on the same die not only offers many benefits, but also creates some technical difficulties. Since the analog circuits exploit the low-level physics of the fabrication process, they remain difficult and costly to design, but they are also vulnerable to any kind of noise or crosstalk signals. The higher levels of integration (moving towards 100 million transistors per chip clocked at ever higher frequencies) make the mixed-signal signal integrity problem increasingly challenging. One of the most important problems is the parasitic supply and substrate noise coupling, caused by the fast switching of the digital circuitry that then propagates to the sensitive analog circuitry via the common substrate. It is therefore important to be able to predict the impact of digital switching noise on the analog circuit performance at the design stage of the integrated system, before the chip is taped out for fabrication, and to understand how this problem can be reduced. The purpose of Substrate Noise Coupling in Mixed-Signal ASICs is to provide an overview of very recent research results in the field of substrate noise analysis and reduction techniques. Much of the reported work has been established as part of the Mixed-Signal Initiative of the European Union. It is a representative sampling of the current state of the art in this area. All the different aspects of the substrate noise coupling problem are covered. Some chapters describe techniques to model and reduce the digital switching noise injected in the substrate. Other chapters describe methods to analyse the propagation of the noise from the source (the digital circuitry) to the reception point (the embedded analog circuitry) through the substrate considered as a resistive/capacitive mesh. Finally, the remaining chapters describe techniques to model and especially to reduce the impact of substrate noise on the analog side. This is illustrated with several practical design examples and measurement results.

Substrate Noise Coupling in Mixed-Signal ASICs

This book is the first in a series of three dedicated to advanced topics in Mixed-Signal IC design methodologies. It is one of the results achieved by the Mixed-Signal Design Cluster, an initiative launched in 1998 as part of the TARDIS project, funded by the European Commission within the ESPRIT-IV Framework. This initiative aims to promote the development of new design and test methodologies for Mixed-Signal ICs, and to accelerate their adoption by industrial users. As Microelectronics evolves, Mixed-Signal techniques are gaining a significant importance due to the wide spread of applications where an analog front-end is needed to drive a complex digital-processing subsystem. In this sense, Analog and Mixed-Signal circuits are recognized as a bottleneck for the market acceptance of Systems-On-Chip, because of the inherent difficulties involved in the design and test of these circuits. Specially, problems arising from the use of a common substrate for analog and digital components are a main limiting factor. The Mixed-Signal Cluster has been formed by a group of 11 Research and Development projects, plus a specific action to promote the dissemination of design methodologies, techniques, and supporting tools developed within the Cluster projects. The whole action, ending in July 2002, has been assigned an overall budget of more than 8 million EURO.

Bo Liu

Francisco V. Fernández

Computational intelligence techniques are becoming more and more important for automated problem solving nowadays. Due to the growing complexity of industrial applications and the increasingly tight time-to-market requirements, the time available for thorough problem analysis and development of tailored solution methods is decreasing. There is no doubt that this trend will continue in the foreseeable future. Hence, it is not surprising that robust and general automated problem solving methods with satisfactory performance are needed.

A Computational Intelligence Approach

Automated Design of Analog and High-frequency Circuits

Michiel Steyaert

Trent McConaghy

Gao Peng

Pieter Palmers

This book describes new tools for front end analog designers, starting with global variation-aware sizing, and extending to novel variation-aware topology design. The tools aid design through automation, but more importantly, they also aid designer insight through automation. We now describe four design tasks, each more general than the previous, and how this book contributes design aids and insight aids to each. The ?rst designer task targeted is global robust sizing. This task is supported by a design tool that does automated, globally reliable, variation-aware s- ing (SANGRIA),and an insight-aiding tool that extracts designer-interpretable whitebox models that relate sizings to circuit performance (CAFFEINE). SANGRIA searches on several levels of problem dif?culty simultaneously, from lower cheap-to-evaluate “exploration” layers to higher full-evaluation “exploitation” layers (structural homotopy). SANGRIAmakes maximal use of circuit simulations by performing scalable data mining on simulation results to choose new candidate designs. CAFFEINE accomplishes its task by tre- ing function induction as a tree-search problem. It constrains its tree search space via a canonical-functional-form grammar, and searches the space with grammatically constrained genetic programming. The second designer task is topology selection/topology design. Topology selection tools must consider a broad variety of topologies such that an app- priate topology is selected, must easily adapt to new semiconductor process nodes, and readily incorporate new topologies. Topology design tools must allow designers to creatively explore new topology ideas as rapidly as possible.

Georges Gielen

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