As the miniaturization of semiconductor technology continues, electronic systems
on chips offer a more extensive and more complex functionality with
better performance, higher frequencies and less power consumption. Whereas
digital designers can take full advantage of the availability of design automation
tools to build huge systems, the lack of support by computer programs for
different abstraction levels makes analog design a time-consuming handcraft
which limits the possibilities to implement large systems. Various approaches
for finding optimal values for the parameters of analog cells, like op amps, have
been investigated since the mid-1980s, and they have made their entrance in
commercial applications. However, a larger impact on the performance is expected
if tools are developed which operate on a higher abstraction level and
consider multiple architectural choices to realize a particular functionality. In
this book, the opportunities, conditions, problems, solutions and systematic
methodologies for this new generation of analog CAD tools are examined.
The outline of this book is as follows. In the first part, the characteristics of
the analog design process are systematically analyzed and several approaches
for automated analog synthesis are summarized. Comparison of their properties
with the requirements for high-level synthesis of analog and mixed-signal
systems results in a new design paradigm: the high-level design flow based
on generic behavior. This design approach involves a modeling strategy using
generic behavioral models and a synthesis strategy leading to the exploration
of a heterogeneous design space containing different architectures.
The modeling strategy is further elaborated in Part II. Generic behavioral
models allow to easily represent a wide range of diverse architectures with
several non-idealities and, at the same time, to exploit specific aspects of a
class of systems leading to efficient evaluation of the performance. Two novel
models are defined in this book. The first one adopts a time-domain approach
and is suited for classes like ΔΣ modulators and sampled-data systems. For
the second model, a new frequency-domain framework has been developed (the
Phase-Frequency Transfer model) which allows the representation of classes
of RF systems like front-ends of wireless receivers.