Virtuoso Analog Design Environment XL – Data Everywhere, But You Have a Review in 10 minutes, Now What?

In my previous blogs, I talked about productivity enhancing features of Virtuoso Analog Design Environment XL and how designers can take advantage of these capabilities to design complex custom analog ICs. The Virtuoso Analog Design Environment XL multi-test bench environment, specification compliance and statistical analysis tools allow designers to cover the design space in a fast and efficient manner. Compiling and documenting all these results and performance metrics for a speedy design review is just as important as generating them. 

Rapid growth in the IP development cost (as a percentage of IC development cost) and the fact that majority of the designs are derivative designs in some shape or form means IP reuse is becoming a critical factor in determining the success of many projects. One of the important aspects of IP reuse is the ability to compile design information and tie it electronically to the IP to ensure accurate and consistent information for reference and reuse.

Using Datasheets

This is where Virtuoso Analog Design Environment XL datasheets come in handy. Virtuoso Analog Design Environment XL datasheets allow designers to specify information (variables, specifications, corners, results waveforms, etc.) that need to be captured, enabling designers to create datasheets with a single click. These HTML datasheets allow users to quickly review designs and share them with other team members and design partners.

The Virtuoso Analog Design Environment XL history assistant allows designers to save results of up to 10 previous history items. This, combined with the ability to easily generate HTML datasheets, saves a significant amount of designer's time while allowing designers to explore different topologies and design variations for optimum performance.  Designers can electronically tie documentation to the IP for efficient review and validation by team members and design partners who might be located in different geographical locations.

Design managers can refer to the datasheets, using them as a means to quickly decide if all or some parts of IP could be reused in a new project. Users can combine and store other documents such as Excel spread sheets, PDF documents, and schematic screenshots along with the datasheets in "ADE XL view" enabling comprehensive design information in a single location. This enables seamless knowledge transfer across the design organizations. Such a methodology of keeping all the information in one location goes a long way in conducting efficient design reviews and helping design teams meet shorter design cycles.

Taking Snapshots

The Virtuoso Schematic Editor XL HTML publisher allows designers to take static snapshots of schematics and include them with verification results and design documentation, enabling designers to review schematics without the need to bring up Virtuoso Schematic Editor and tie up licenses that could be better used by other designers.

With the explosive growth of verification coverage, documenting results is becoming crucial to ensure that designers do not duplicate the efforts of fellow team members or waste their precious time rerunning same simulations because they failed to document results in the first place. Virtuoso Analog Design Environment XL datasheets allow designers to avoid such pitfalls by providing them with an easy to use, efficient mechanism to generate datasheets with a single click, allowing them to focus their energies on more important issues - such as designing the custom analog ICs.

Here are the links to some of the Virtuoso Analog Design Environment XL videos.

Note: You need a COS (Cadence Online Support) account to access these videos.

Creating Datasheets in Virtuoso Analog Design Environment XL

Rama Jupalli