Top-down methodology in industrial mixed-signals design

Analogue and mixed-signal designs are fast becoming significant in System-On-Chip (SoC) designs as digital computational cores need to interface with the real world. Cellular phones, magnetic disk drives, speech recognition hardware and other 'digital' innovations in fact rely on a core of analogue circuitry. Mature digital CAD tools competently handle the digital portions of SoC designs. This is not true for analogue and mixed-signals components, still designed manually using time-consuming techniques. A good top-down design methodology can drastically reduce the design time of analogue components in SoCs and allow comprehensive functionality verification. This paper contains a critical survey of current design processes and tools, a top-down design case study and introduces MIX-SYN, a new platform for fast-tracking exploration and design time for the analogue and mixed-signals design industry.