Fast prototyping of semi-custom bipolar analog ASICs

The authors present a complete system, hardware and software, for the quick turnaround of bipolar analog ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). The hardware consists of specially designed chips containing pre-diffused tiles of versatile active devices called twinstors (combinations of NPN and PNP transistors), resistors, and some special devices. The software is an assignment and routing package, which was written to fully exploit the high degree of flexibility inherent in the chip design and which is capable of taking analog constraints into account.<<ETX>>