EDA getting serious about analog, mixed-signal

Long assigned supporting roles by suppliers, analog and mixed-signal design tools could soon become a battleground for leading EDA vendors. Synopsys Inc. will counter Cadence Design Systems Inc.'s recently released Virtuoso custom tool platform with its own AMS (analog, mixed-signal) verification platform, and up-and-coming analog tool startup Neolinear Inc. is raising its profile with an upgraded layout tool set.
The road maps of the EDA industry's three leading vendors - Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor Graphics Corp. - have charted merged analog and digital design tools for years, but the companies have only recently started to address this area seriously.

Synopsys has gained an edge over Cadence by merging its digital IC front-end tools with the physical tools gained in its acquisition of Avanti Corp. Now Cadence is pressing hard to retain its position in full-custom design. The company owned 80 percent of that market in 2002, according to a Gartner Dataquest study, followed by Mentor Graphics. Cadence draws a third of its revenue from custom design tools and can ill afford to lose its position, as it now finds itself playing catch-up to Synopsys on the IC implementation front, financial analysts said.

The increasing amount of analog circuitry in system-on-chip designs has underscored the importance of offering viable analog and mixed-signal tools, and merging them with digital tools. But since AMS and full-custom designs have traditionally been little served by EDA vendors, these designs remain the least automated.

Most design tools and marketing efforts focus on "digital," said Tom Beckley, president and CEO of Neolinear. "There's a big push right now to market 'digital' in everything-cell phones, PDAs, TVs. But if you crack open a cellphone you'll see that most of the chips and parts of SoCs controlling the digital phone are actually analog," he said.

A recent study by IBS Corp. predicts that 73 percent of all design starts will have some degree of mixed-signal content by 2006, according to Bijan Kiani, VP of marketing for AMS products at Synopsys. "We are taking this market very seriously," said Kiani. "It is where the market is headed."

Discovery AMS is the first addition to the verification platform Synopsys introduced last May, Kiani said. It ties the company's VCS RTL and gate-level digital simulator with the NanoSim Spice simulator, HSpice simulator, and Star-RCXT extraction engine. The latter tools previously ran together in a co-simulation mode, but under Discovery AMS they run on common device models and execute from a single model evaluation engine. This ensures that accuracy is maintained whether designs are being run on NanoSim or HSpice, Kiani said. Discovery also includes a feature that commands Star-RCXT to extract only the data from HSpice or NanoSim that VCS requires to run simulation on mixed-block devices.