Abstract
Virtual prototyping of Analog/Mixed-Signal (AMS) systems is a key concern in modern SoC verification. Achieving first-time right designs is a challenging task: Every relevant functional and non-functional property has to be examined throughout the complete design process. Many faulty designs have been verified carefully before tape out but are still missing at least one low-level effect which arises from interaction between one or more system components. Since these extra-functional effects are often neglected on system level, the design cannot be rectified in early design stages or verified before fabrication. We introduce a method to determine system acceptance regions tackling this challenge: We include extra-functional effects into the system models, and we investigate their behavior with parallel simulations in combination with an accelerated analog simulation scheme. The accelerated simulation approach is based on local linearizations of nonlinear circuits, which result in piecewise-linear systems. High-level simulation speed-up is achieved by avoiding numerical integration and using parallel computing. This approach is fully automated requiring only a circuit netlist. To reduce the overall number of simulations, we use an adaptive sampling algorithm for exploring systems acceptance regions which indicate feasible and critical operating conditions of the AMS system.
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Gläser, G., Lee, HS.L., Olbrich, M., Barke, E. (2018). Knowing Your AMS System’s Limits: System Acceptance Region Exploration by Using Automated Model Refinement and Accelerated Simulation. In: Fummi, F., Wille, R. (eds) Languages, Design Methods, and Tools for Electronic System Design. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 454. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62920-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62920-9_1
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