Introduction

Abstract

Nowadays, the semiconductor industry and the design community are facing some very exciting and difficult challenges. For this industry to continue with its phenomenal historical growth and the well-known Moore’s law, advances in all fronts are necessary. Although the integration of more and more functionalities onto a single chip is being proven as an effective strategy in terms of fabrication costs, the design effort has been continuously increasing. Both tightening time-to-market pressures and increasing design complexity are widening the gap between the available number of transistors and the ability to design them. This is even more pronounced in the area of analog and mixed-signal design, since design automation is still very far from its digital counterpart. Furthermore, analog and mixed-signal design methodologies are unable to cope with time-to-market and design complexity, the two fundamental forces driving the semiconductor industry.