Synthesis on programmable analog devices from VHDL-AMS

Abstract

Nowadays, the microelectronics market is characterized by an increasing complexity and integration, in particular in the field of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) not only for digital but also for mixed-signal designs. The lack of a well defined methodology for analog synthesis, similar to the digital field means a serious drawback for analog and mixed signal design development. In this sense, the arise of VHDL-AMS is a recent evolution which promises to link analog design automation tasks into a coherent framework, in a similar fashion that digital design. In this paper, a tool to perform automated synthesis of analog systems, described in VHDL-AMS, into analog programmable devices is presented. The tool is focused to synthesise filters, wave-shaping circuits, amplifiers and in general most circuits supported by programmable technology. It is demonstrated with a practical example of a analog system composed by two filters and two controllable gain stages.