Missing Analog Tools – A Proposal

After some 50 years of analog and mixed-signal design (AMS), new analog tools and methodology are emerging to greatly improve the productivity of AMS design technology processes. These include emerging AMS synthesis, formal methods, and design languages. In this paper, we describe an area of much needed AMS design improvements that seems to largely have been overlooked. This area concerns the “lower levels ” of typical AMS design processes usually handled “manually ” by AMS designers using intuition, hand calculations, and simulator-aided non-automated manual approaches. The paper first describes the several areas of analog and mixed signal design problems, the related need for productivity and impact of this situation. The paper then proposes some specific analog/AMS tools that would greatly reduce the amount of manual detailed design effort, assist designers in keeping tabs on non-core-design mundane details with little effort, and should lead to improved productivity of analog designers. The target tools include such mundane analog design capabilities such as power, biasing, gains and margins, component value and tolerance setting, thermal, energy analysis, impedances, worst case, distortion, noise, and coupling