SYMPHONY: a fast mixed signal simulator for BiMOS analog/digital circuits

Author

Buch, Premal ; Kuh, Ernest S.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA

fYear

1997

fDate

4-7 Jan 1997

Firstpage

403

Lastpage

407

Abstract

SYMPHONY a mixed signal simulator which exploits the special characteristics of BiMOS mixed signal circuits is presented. SYMPHONY contains a fast simulator for digital circuits and several new techniques to efficiently simulate BiMOS circuits. The typical switching behavior of bipolar devices in digital setting is exploited by using a simplified model to approximate the bipolar device characteristics. The problem of minimizing the worst case approximation error is formulated and a heuristic is proposed to achieve this by using a PWL model with expanded Chebyshev points as the breakpoints. Dynamic circuit partitioning is combined with an event-driven approach to exploit the latency and multi-rate behavior. Experimental results demonstrate that SYMPHONY can yield 2×-250× speed-up over SPICE3e depending upon the amount of analog circuitry present in the design

Keywords

BIMOS integrated circuits; circuit analysis computing; mixed analogue-digital integrated circuits; BiMOS analog/digital circuit; Chebyshev points; PWL model; SYMPHONY; approximation error minimization; bipolar device; dynamic circuit partitioning; event management; mixed signal simulator; switching; Approximation error; Chebyshev approximation; Circuit simulation; Computational modeling; Digital circuits; Discrete event simulation; Engines; Feedback circuits; SPICE; Signal design;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

VLSI Design, 1997. Proceedings., Tenth International Conference on

Conference_Location

Hyderabad

ISSN

1063-9667

Print_ISBN

0-8186-7755-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICVD.1997.568164

Filename

568164