Pressure Builds To Adopt Virtual Prototypes


Virtual prototypes, often used as a niche tool in the past, are becoming essential for developing complex systems. In fact, systems companies are finding they no longer can function without them. In the semiconductor industry, a virtual prototype is a model for a system at an abstraction level above RTL. But there is no such thing as 'the' virtual prototype. They are constructed for a partic... » read more

Generating the Generator: A User-Driven And Template-Based Approach Towards Analog Layout Automation


Various analog design automation attempts have addressed the shortcomings of the still largely manual and, thus, inefficient and risky analog design approach. These methods can roughly be divided into synthesis and procedural generation. An important key aspect has, however, rarely been considered: usability. While synthesis requires sophisticated constraints, procedural generators require expe... » read more

Design Of An Ultra-Low-Power Current Steering DAC In A Modern SOI technology


Despite the tremendous advancement in innovations on digitizing and processing signals over the last century, real world signals are inevitably analog in nature. A digital-to-analog converter (DAC) serves in translating these digitized signals into different analog quantities like voltage, current or charges. We mainly focus on a Nyquist-rate current-steering digital- to-analog converte... » read more