An open and integrated analog design and analysis framework

Abstract S A discussion is presented stating the require-ments for an open analog design framework. Currently,there is no framework that focuses on analog design. There-fore, we rst give an overview of a formalized design o w.Based on this o w, we propose a software architecture thatcan efciently implement the key components of the designtrajectory. Following this, an initial version of a frame-work implementing the above considerations is presented.Special attention is given to the user’s expectations w.r.t.transparency and reducing the overhead of his work. Anoverview is given of general modules (graphical output, op-timization algorithms, ...) and more specic ones. Thislast category focuses on dedicated solutions for the designof particular analog sub-blocks. Finally, future extensionsare summarized. I. I NTRODUCTION While there are a number of different commercial EDA de-sign frameworks, they are mostly tailored to digital designer’sneeds. They are also rather big and can sometimes even be con-sidered ’overkill’for analog design due to their inclusion of var-ious digitalŒonly functionality. Specic tools for analog designare not included by default and the framework’s architecture isnot really open, making it difcult or sometimes impossible tointerface with the user’s own developed tools or scripts. There-fore, in section II, we will rst discuss the requirements foran open analog design framework. The necessary componentsthat are needed to support the trajectory for a generic designmethodology are shown. In section III, the implementation of aframework that uses the derived formalized design o w is pre-sented. Special attention is given to the user expectations. Ob-viously, the methodology should be as much as possible trans-parent to the user and be a minimal burden on top of his actualwork. An overview is given of general modules (graphical out-put, optimization algorithms, ...) and more specic ones. Thislast category includes for instance the highŒlevel analysis anddesign module D