Bluetooth transceiver design and simulation with VHDL-AMS

This article describes the design challenges of BlueTraCTM, a low-cost, low-power radio transceiver, and the usage of mixed-signal/mixed-mode techniques and behavioral modeling with ADVance MS (ADMS) from Mentor Graphics to address and solve them. BlueTraC from Spirea is a Bluetooth 1.1-compliant Class 2 radio transceiver. In addition to all the required RF and analog functions, the chip also includes a complete digital GFSK modem, making it a very complex mixed-signal (MS) system-on-chip (SOC). VHDL-AMS, the mixed-signal IEEE 1076.1 standard modeling language, was used to describe the SoC building blocks at different levels of detail and complexity. This permitted us to perform top-level functional verification and debugging as well as detailed subsystem simulations throughout the design process. We will present the concept and the results we obtained in terms of performance and accuracy. The methodology that we deployed increased the confidence in silicon success and allowed on-time delivery.