Maximizing the impact of power ICs via a time-to-market CAD driven power ASIC strategy

Great strides have been made in developing silicon processes that provide the benefits of high-level integration to power circuits. A recent example of such work at Harris Semiconductor has been the development of a power application-specific integrated circuit (PASIC) technology that allows integration on a single chip of a complete 1 MHz DC-DC converter. Despite such technological achievements, the marketplace further demands quick/low-risk design cycle times to capture opportunities before market windows close. It is also imperative to provide easy access to the technology for system-level designers, as opposed to traditional circuit designers, since they ultimately are knowledgeable and responsible for defining the function to be produced. The authors describe Harris´s PASIC technology and demonstrate how computer-aided design (CAD) tools and concurrent engineering methods have been applied to achieve the above objective