Analog Scan: Unlocking A New Era In Mixed-Signal Test


Anyone involved in IC product sign-off that includes a mixed signal design portion knows that developing robust tests for these intricate designs has historically been a significant bottleneck, no matter the application. It's a hurdle many of us have faced, leading to extended development times, high costs, and sometimes an unsettling uncertainty about the true quality of our tests. Traditio... » read more

The New Design Advantage: Why Unifying Processing And Connectivity Simplifies The Design Experience


Devices are becoming smarter, more capable, and more distributed, but the way we design them has not kept pace. For engineers, that progress increasingly brings tradeoffs: latency bottlenecks, rising power demands, and fragmented system architectures that complicate even well-understood designs. As functionality increases, so does the difficulty of fitting multiple analog and digital components... » read more

AI In A/MS IC Design: Between Buzzword And Productivity Boost


In the past few years, AI has burst onto the public stage in grand style. This ongoing trend is apparent in the rising number of AI applications in everyday life. But more and more, it can also be seen in a broad range of technical niches, where the main motivation is AI’s promise of continuously increasing efficiency. One such niche that has seen decades of attempts to achieve greater eff... » read more

Mixed Messages Complicate Mixed-Signal


Several years ago, analog and mixed signal (AMS) content hit a wall. Its contribution to first-time chip failure doubled, and there is no evidence that anything has improved dramatically since then. Some see that the problem is likely to get worse due to issues associated with advanced nodes, while others see hope for improvement coming from AI or chiplets. Fig. 1: Cause of ASIC respins. S... » read more

How Secure Are Analog Circuits?


The move toward multi-die assemblies and the increasing value of sensor data at the edge are beginning to focus attention and raise questions about security in analog circuits. In most SoC designs today, security is almost entirely a digital concern. Security requirements in digital circuits are well understood, particularly in large data centers and at the upper end of edge computing, which... » read more

Analog Creates Ripples in Digital Verification


We live in an analog world, but analog has been minimized whenever possible. At some point digital and analog must come together in every electronic device, and that has long been an area where errors creep in. The Wilson Research Group and Siemens EDA functional verification study has long shown that analog and mixed signal are two of the highest causes of flaws that result in chip respins.... » read more

Big Changes Ahead For Analog Design


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact of heterogeneous integration on in-house analog tools, and how that is changing the design process, with Mo Faisal, president and CEO of Movellus; Hany Elhak, executive director of product management at Synopsys; Cedric Pujol, product manager at Keysight; and Pradeep Thiagarajan, principal product manager for custom ... » read more

Formal Verification Of A Mixed Signal IP with Both Digital And Analog Blocks


A new technical paper titled "Analogous Alignments: Digital "Formally" meets Analog" was published by researchers at Infineon Technologies. Abstract: "The complexity of modern-day System-on-Chips (SoCs) is continually increasing, and it becomes increasingly challenging to deliver dependable and credible chips in a short time-to-market. Especially, in the case of test chips, where the aim is... » read more

Mixed Signal In-Memory Computing With Massively Parallel Gradient Calculations of High-Degree Polynomials


A new technical paper titled "Computing high-degree polynomial gradients in memory" was published by researchers at UCSB, HP Labs, Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH, and RWTH Aachen University. Abstract "Specialized function gradient computing hardware could greatly improve the performance of state-of-the-art optimization algorithms. Prior work on such hardware, performed in the context of Isi... » read more

Managing Complexity And A Left Shift: Reconfigurable Mixed-Signal Circuits For Complex Integrated Systems


By Björn Zeugmann and Benjamin Prautsch The chip market is growing worldwide; it’s projected to nearly double by 2030 to over one trillion dollars. Most of this market is made up of digital functions in the form of logic, microprocessors, and memory. Although analog ICs account for only around 15% of the total, they are key components for overall systems and are therefore almost always pr... » read more

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