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| Mixed-signal circuits have entered mainstream design focus as heavily integrated communication chips have attracted large volumes within consumer markets such as the cell phone industry. However, despite the growing demand for such chips, design methodologies for achieving first pass silicon have been lacking. This session presents a top-down strategy for such design, and introduces VppSim as a tool for high level behavioral simulation based on C++ module descriptions. The use of C++ allows very fast simulation speed and highly configurable module behavior, and also allows seamless transition into digital and mixed-signal design flows using NCVerilog and AMS Designer, respectively. Using the presented top-down design methodology within the Cadence environment, we show four custom mixed-signal ICs which have achieved their desired performance in first pass silicon. These custom CMOS ICs correspond to a 3.6 GHz, low noise, wide bandwidth fractional-N frequency synthesizer, a 2.5 Gb/s, low jitter, clock and data recovery circuit, a 3.1 GHz limit amplifier with fast offset correction, and a new VCO-based continuous-time Sigma-Delta A/D converter. Readers will learn the strategies of how first pass silicon was achieved in these designs, and will better understand the benefits and limitations of behavioral simulation in general.
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| | A Top Down Design Methodology for Mixed-signal Integrated Circuits using the VppSim Simulator »
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About the author
Michael H. Perrott received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM in 1988, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 and 1997, respectively.
From 1997 to 1998, he worked at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA, on high speed circuit techniques for Sigma-Delta synthesizers.
In 1999, he was a visiting Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and taught a course on the theory and implementation of frequency synthesizers. From 1999 to 2001, he worked at Silicon Laboratories in Austin, TX, and developed circuit and signal processing techniques to achieve high performance clock and data recovery circuits. He is currently an Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and focuses on high speed circuit and signal processing techniques for data links and wireless applications. |
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