Standard Analog?
Analog design has always been considered one of the last bastions of truly creative design, where industry rules don’t necessarily apply and where independent thinking is rewarded by fat profit margins.
That’s about to change., however. Standards are coming to the analog world, driven in large part by the convergence of analog and digital on a system on chip and the need to get SoCs out the door on time and within budget.
“This is a pain point in design,” said Shrenik Mehta, chairman of the standards group Accellera. “If you are getting productivity, people want to re-use that. With analog right now you can’t. You need to get new expertise every time.”
Accellera introduced its first Verilog analog standard during the Design Automation Conference last summer. The standard provided standards for assertions and modeling, but the feature set was limited, said Mehta. He noted that the next version will provide interoperability among the tools.
No less controversial among designers is the standard for power. Accellera’s Unified Power Format (UPF) is pitted directly against Si2’s Common Power Format. However, with the backing of most of the industry’s large players behind UPF—including Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Magma and Sun Microsystems, it will be an uphill battle for Si2 and Cadence, which turned over CPF to Si2.
UPF has been submitted to IEEE. The first round of balloting generated sufficient votes for the standard to pass, sources say. The next step is for the regulatory community to submit its corrections. Finally, after that process, the standard can be published.
–Ed Sperling
Tags: Accellera, analog, Cadence, low-power design, Magma, Mentor Graphics, SoC, standards, Sun Microsystems, Synopsys
April 7th, 2009 at 4:52 am
I don’t think any standards will work for Analog Design. Analog Design requires experience for the design to reach the right specifications with optimum performance. Also, the techniques used by Analog Designers are quite abstract and take into account many parameters at a time.
Modeling a Multi-Dimensional Problem and that too with a continuously varying analog input is still a problem for the mathematicians to work on. Modeling Analog design is similar to modeling a natural phenomenon like weather changes.
How do you model experience and abstractness?? That is the problem that needs to be solved first.