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Subject: Mixed-mode simulation
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szczygie
Posts: 3
Online: User is Offline
10/02/2007 5:47 AM  
Dear all,

Writing this mail I assume that you can help me to find the best way (tools and parcices) to make a small mixed mode IC using the latest Cadence tools.

Lets assume the following:
1. The IC will have a small digital part only (5k gates, say).
2. We use analogue-on-top aproach, as the analogue part will be much bigger in terms of area.
3. The analogue design is full-custom, using Virtuoso + Spectre + ASSURA.
4. The digital block is synthesised from Verilog (RTL Compiler) and placed&routed (Encounter).

My question is: which way is the best to proceed from now? I mean mixed-mode simulations,
chip assembly and final verificiation (including output gds file verification).

Should we import the design into Virtuoso environment and make mixed-mode simulations from ADE? Exporting a single gds is then easy, but is this a right way way?) Or should we use AMS Designer? How about layout verification than?

Any hints/comments welcome.

Robert
AGH UST
jmbeck
moderator
Posts: 12
Online: User is Offline
10/02/2007 6:13 AM  
Dear Robert,

the answer to your question depends on many parameters of your design and design-kit. If you have only one digital block, it is straight forward to import it into Virtuoso: In Encounter you need to generate GDS, verilog without physical instances for simulation and verilog with physical instances for verification. In Virtuoso AMS-simulator you can easily tell to use the simulation_only verilog files for full-chip simulation and the imported layout_verification verilog files should provide a 1 to 1 match for layout vs schematic testing. We use this flow regularly for the purpose you mentioned

However, there might be pitfalls.
- Things get very different, depending on whether your digital designkit provides full standart-cell layouts or abstracts only. You may find it difficult to tell the LVS how to identify abstracts... Easy way out: make an LVS dummy of the digital part with analog transistors inside, which connect to the top level ports of the cell. After verification, replace the dummy by the acctual digital part.
- You may need a layer-mapping file at streamout from Encounter, to make the layers of the digital part appear right in the Virtuoso layout.
- Alternatively you could use LEF/DEF or OA to exchange data, but this is for recent versions of the software only, and has some flaws as well, if your digital and analog design kit use different layer names...

In general, your approach seems fine to me and you can definitely get it to work that way. You might need some tweaks here and there -- if your designkit is cool, it might just work without any hassle. I do it the same way and keep doing it :-)

If you have any doubts, dont hesitate to post again. I would appreciate to hear about your progress when you get there.

Cheers, Joachim

szczygie
Posts: 3
Online: User is Offline
10/18/2007 8:08 AM  
Thank you for the answer, Joachim.

We have the Austiamicrosystems Hit-Kit with the layouts of standard cells included, so there is no problem of doing the LVS on the transistor level after importing the verilog netlist into Virtuoso. We can also do mixed-mode simulations via ADE.

My original question was trigger by licensing issues. We currently use IC 5.41 USR4 with licenses ver. 6, with the new feature naming conventions (34500 was changed to Vituoso_Schematic_Editor_* etc). Our flow works fine in this conditions, with the single exception of mixed-mode simulations. When we try to run the simulation from the ADE (spectreVerilog, say) it nicely makes the netlists, but when it comes to starting the simulators it tries to get 34510 license. And it does not get it, of course, at the feature does not exist in the license file. Then the question is: is there another way of running mixed-mode simulations (not using ADE?) or this is just a bug in the IC?

Best regards,

Robert
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