lagos.jl
Member level 1
Hi all!
I would like to ask for your advice on the easiest way of migrating an
entire analog design from one technology to a completely different
one, at the schematic level (i.e., no layout views involved
whatsoever). The situation is as follows.
I have developed a more-or-less large analog design whose library
contains dozens of cells (about 80), and which altogether comprise
about 7-8 levels of hierarchy (i.e., from the most atomical ones to
the top-level). At this point we are only interested on the general
behavior of the architecture, and thus the design has been completed
only at the schematic level. Luckily enough, the design is made up
solely of pmos and nmos transistors (no res, caps, etc), which belong
to the vanilla-flavor transistors of a 0.35um CMOS process. Beside
these mosfets, the only other components are ideal current sources,
used for modeling biasing. Moreover, all the instances of these
transistors have their W and L values defined as variables, and in the
whole design there are no hard-specified values of any kind. The total
number of variables in the final hierarchy is only about 12 (including
variables for bias voltages and currents).
So far, so good. I have successfully validated the performance of the
aforementioned design, and now i need to assess how this performance
would change when migrating the architecture to a 180um CMOS process.
Obviously the most straightforward way to accomplish this would be
to just make a copy of the entire library, attach it to the new
technology and then manually edit the most atomic cells for replacing
all the pmos and nmos of the old process with their respective
counterparts in the new technology. However, I had tried this and
doing it for large cells results rather impractical and very prone to
human error. What's more, depending on the performance results of the
migrated design it is very likely that we will be interested in
further migrating it to other technologies (e.g. 90nm CMOS), thus
increasing the manual effort exponentially. It is therefore clear
that this manual approach to cell edition is not a viable solution for
migrating the entire architecture.
Taking all this into consideration, I am desperately seeking for an
alternative way of translating the design in a more or less automated
fashion. I suspect all that is needed to do is editing the atomic
cell's netlists for making the appropriate replacement for each
transistor instance, a task that could be implemented by code.
However, I have never worked seriously at the code level in Cadence,
and I have no idea on what to edit, which language to use, nor where
to start.
I am quite positive that I can accomplish these goals, but I need help
to get started. Please let me know if you have any idea on how to
approach the solution to this problem. Any help is appreciated!!!
Thanks so much for any ideas, and sorry for the long post!
Regards,
I would like to ask for your advice on the easiest way of migrating an
entire analog design from one technology to a completely different
one, at the schematic level (i.e., no layout views involved
whatsoever). The situation is as follows.
I have developed a more-or-less large analog design whose library
contains dozens of cells (about 80), and which altogether comprise
about 7-8 levels of hierarchy (i.e., from the most atomical ones to
the top-level). At this point we are only interested on the general
behavior of the architecture, and thus the design has been completed
only at the schematic level. Luckily enough, the design is made up
solely of pmos and nmos transistors (no res, caps, etc), which belong
to the vanilla-flavor transistors of a 0.35um CMOS process. Beside
these mosfets, the only other components are ideal current sources,
used for modeling biasing. Moreover, all the instances of these
transistors have their W and L values defined as variables, and in the
whole design there are no hard-specified values of any kind. The total
number of variables in the final hierarchy is only about 12 (including
variables for bias voltages and currents).
So far, so good. I have successfully validated the performance of the
aforementioned design, and now i need to assess how this performance
would change when migrating the architecture to a 180um CMOS process.
Obviously the most straightforward way to accomplish this would be
to just make a copy of the entire library, attach it to the new
technology and then manually edit the most atomic cells for replacing
all the pmos and nmos of the old process with their respective
counterparts in the new technology. However, I had tried this and
doing it for large cells results rather impractical and very prone to
human error. What's more, depending on the performance results of the
migrated design it is very likely that we will be interested in
further migrating it to other technologies (e.g. 90nm CMOS), thus
increasing the manual effort exponentially. It is therefore clear
that this manual approach to cell edition is not a viable solution for
migrating the entire architecture.
Taking all this into consideration, I am desperately seeking for an
alternative way of translating the design in a more or less automated
fashion. I suspect all that is needed to do is editing the atomic
cell's netlists for making the appropriate replacement for each
transistor instance, a task that could be implemented by code.
However, I have never worked seriously at the code level in Cadence,
and I have no idea on what to edit, which language to use, nor where
to start.
I am quite positive that I can accomplish these goals, but I need help
to get started. Please let me know if you have any idea on how to
approach the solution to this problem. Any help is appreciated!!!
Thanks so much for any ideas, and sorry for the long post!
Regards,