A complete and fully qualified design flow for verification of mixed-signal SoC with embedded flash memories

ABSTRACT

Today almost all the people in the industry are talking widely about full chip mixed-signal simulation, both in pre-layout and post-layout conditions, basically for two main reasons: a large range of applications is moving from fully digital to mixed-signal and full chip simulation with parasitic components, together with IR drop analysis, is becoming strictly mandatory before going to silicon. In fact, the cost of a mask set for a 90nm or a 65nm technology is growing in an exponential way, passing the million dollar for any single mask set. For these reasons, it is strategic to set up a very complete mixed-signal design flow allowing designers to go to the silicon in a safe way with the minimum risk of failure. Nowadays, various approaches to the same problem are pursued by different organizations, sometimes privileging the fully digital modeling of the mixed-signal system and some other times setting the digital part in VHDL and keeping the analog part at transistor level, simulating the whole chip with a mixed-signal simulator. Which is the right approach? Which are the status and the reliability of the tools on the market? Which is the acceptable trade-off among simulation speed, code coverage and precision of simulation results? This paper tries to answer to these questions proposing a fully qualified and complete mixed-signal flow for SoC verification, implemented to design applications also containing embedded flash memories.

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