Mixed-Signal Design Blogs

The vast majority of SoCs today are advanced mixed-signal designs. The old mixed-signal world looked like an analog environment on the left bolted to a digital environment on the right. Depending on which engineering group was responsible for final assembly, one part would be treated as a black box and the two parts would be bolted together at the system-on-chip (SoC) level. But today's mixed-signal designs have multiple...

Why is There a Need for Low Power Solutions? With an increase in the demand for high-performance, multi-tasking systems-on-chips (SoCs) for communication and computing, the power requirements for these electronic chips have also greatly increased. There has been a surge in the production of portable devices like mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and game boxes that support multiple applications and use various multimedia...

Virtuoso Space-Based Router (VSR) is routing solution integrated into the Virtuoso Layout Suite, which provides a comprehensive set of routing features for a variety of layout tasks. One major design task for layout designs is chip/block assembly routing in mixed-signal analog top (AoT) designs. What's new in Virtuoso IC6.1.6? VSR routing engines were enhanced to improve routing quality (QoR) and to give better...

If you're a fan of the Star Trek series (my six-year-old son and I watch it together faithfully!), you know the Vulcan Mind Meld. (If you're not a Trekkie, the mind-meld is a process of transferring one's knowledge to another person instantly). Mixed-Signal Technology Summit , Oct. 10 at Cadence's San Jose campus, is the closest thing to a mind meld to share mixed-signal design practices and challenges among the design...

Cadence is bringing the Analog/Mixed-Signal Summit to Shenzhen, China, and the Mixed-Signal/Low-Power Focused Technology-On-Tours to Penang and Singapore later in July 2013. Cadence will showcase mixed-signal and low-power solutions aimed at designs that cater to the always connected world. With smart devices taking over our everyday lives, design teams are moving towards complex mixed-signal designs with advanced low...

I had the great opportunity to represent Cadence at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) at Austin a few weeks back. In my role as a Mixed-Signal Solutions evangelist at Cadence, I was thoroughly amazed by the excitement from the ever growing design community at this year's DAC. For Cadence, this was an excellent opportunity to showcase the various technologies covering system, IP and SoC designs. A common theme...

We just completed some hugely successful Mixed-Signal Tech-on-Tours in North America. I am back in San Jose after this whirlwind trip that covered 9 cities in 4 weeks. Even though being on the road does get tedious, what kept me excited was the enthusiasm shown among Cadence customers for the Mixed-Signal Tech-on-Tour events. Close to 400 customers attended these Mixed-Signal Tech-On-Tour events. The Dallas Mixed...

At CDNLive-Silicon Valley this year, we had an excellent mixed-signal track for two days. Cadence customers including IBM, Texas Instruments, Maxim and Freescale shared their mixed-signal methodologies and tricks with the Cadence design community. The key challenges that our mixed-signal customers face are in SoC level verification and seamless analog/digital implementation. Cadence has been addressing these challenges...

We are seeing a huge trend -- the mobile revolution is changing the way we go about our everyday lives. Gone are the days where the term 'Internet' was associated with a PC or Mac. The smartphone revolution has changed how the data is consumed and used by consumers and businesses. For example, with the new line of smart systems, every device or appliance is connected to the Internet to manage their services in a better...

Cadence holds a leading position in the EDA industry due to its broad product portfolio catering to digital and analog designs and the ever popular mixed-signal designs. With its immense technical and market leadership based on the Virtuoso platform for analog design and Encounter platform for digital design , Cadence EDA products helps designers achieve productivity gains and predictable design closure for today's complex...

In September 2012, Cadence held its second Mixed-Signal Summit in San Jose, California. 150 users attended the Summit. The full day program was packed by user presentations. Strong participation and attendance was yet another confirmation of increased design activities in the mixed-signal area. Attendees used the opportunity to ask questions, share experiences and network. Dr. Chi-Ping Hsu, Cadence Senior Vice president...

Japan’s semiconductor industry is undergoing a significant change in recent years. We are seeing a shrinking business in SoC development while design and semiconductor companies are trying to focus more on higher profitable and differentiable products like microcontrollers and power management ICs. Most such designs are mixed-signal designs and hence the demand for technologies and innovations in this area is very high...

Are you working in the area of mixed signal? Then you may want to exchange information and experiences with other engineers. At the Cadence Community, a new Mixed-Signal Design Forum has been launched, providing a place to discuss topics that cross between analog and digital domains. It doesn't matter if you're just starting with mixed-signal design, or you have a lot of experience. This is a customer-driven forum that...

The recently concluded ARM TechCon 2012 , the annual event for ARM users (including hardware and software engineers) along with ARM ecosystem partners, was a huge success. Once again, this event showcased the excellent Cadence-ARM partnership that's helping to bring next generation electronic designs to fruition for our customers. Cadence had a huge presence at ARM TechCon. On the first day (Chip Design Day) Cadence...

The well attended Mixed-Signal Technology Summit last month really demonstrated the tremendous interest our customers have in learning new methodologies and techniques for mixed-signal designs. I would like to share some interesting data points based on a survey from the attendees of the event. Among the close to 200 attendees, 73% were designers with analog centric design experiences. However, about 24% of them declared...

A press release and a blog post caught my attention this week (October 15, 2012), and they have clearly demonstrated Cadence's leadership in 20nm process nodes and mixed-signal solutions. The press release is titled " TSMC Selects Cadence Virtuoso and Encounter Platforms for its 20nm Design Infrastructure, Spanning Custom/Analog, Digital and Mixed-Signal Design ." This press release emphasizes that TSMC's 20nm reference...

I recently came across a Wall Street Journal article, "ARM Chases Bigger Slice of Smaller Chips," that provides a very interesting perspective on how ARM is positioned to capture the microcontroller market, which is its next growth area. ARM based microprocessors are clearly dominating the mobile products from smart phones to tablets across Windows, Android and IOS mobile eco-systems. Most of these devices are using...

Even though it's been over 2 months since this year's Design Automation Conference in San Francisco, I am still surprised by the response that metric-driven, mixed-signal verification gets from our design community. Cadence had quite a few customer presentations at the EDA360 Theater at DAC this year. However, there was one presentation titled "Metric Driven Verification Approach for Analog/Mixed Signal IPs" authored...

While most of my colleagues in the US were taking a nice break during the July 4 th week, a small group of people including me was on the road for a mixed-signal Tech-on-Tour in China. There was some debate internally on whether designers in China would be interested in such a topic. What we had experienced last week was a clear (not mixed) signal from the IC designer community in China that they are hungry for knowledge...

About a year ago, Cadence offered a worldwide Tech-On-Tour (ToT) series for mixed-signal designs. One main objective of this seminar series is to bring the awareness of the need for a design methodology change to the broad mixed-signal designer community worldwide. The event was very successful and you can find some previous blog coverage here: M/S Technology on Tour Blog - Model Validation and Assertion Based Verification...

Analog/mixed-signal design is a hot topic at the Design Automation Conference! At DAC 2012 at San Francisco's Moscone Center next week (June 4-7), you can keep up with the latest developments in mixed-signal design methodology, including design, implementation and verification. You will find it is very hard to choose from so many options. Here is a quick guide to presentations, demos and other events Cadence is involved...

The new era of “Internet Everywhere” creates a whole new spectrum of applications, ranging from health care, automotive, to entertainment and cloud computing, which demand more and more mixed-signal and low power designs. In fact, mixed-signal applications have become one of the fastest growing segments in the electronics and semiconductor industry. Traditional mixed-signal designs treat the analog and digital designs...

Let's assume you are managing a schematic-driven top level design in Virtuoso and you want to import a digital block Verilog netlist into Virtuoso. This is a very common use model in mixed-signal implementation. While the Layout Database is saved in Open Access (OA), the optimized Verilog netlist needs to be imported into Virtuoso. Why use CPF? The Common Power Format (CPF) describes the design power intent for the whole...

The purpose for creating a Pcell is to automate the creation of data. Pcells should be designed as standalone entities, independent of the environment in which they are created and independent of the variety of environments in which you or someone else might want to use them. An environment can react to a Pcell, but Pcell code should not react to, interact with, or be dependent on an environment. Although it is possible...

Mixed-signal applications are among the fastest growing segments in the electronics and semiconductor industry. Applications in mobile communication, networking, power management, automotive, medical, imaging, safety and security require a very high integration of analog and digital functionality at system, SoC and IP levels. Unfortunately, compared with the advancement of digital designs over the past decade, the state...