On Analog Circuit Emulation with Digital FPGA Environment(3/3)

Currently, most of modern systems include both digital and analog circuits in the same design. Because the design and verification flows are quite different for these two kinds of circuits, it is difficult to perform the integration verification of the whole mixed-signal systems. In order to shorten the design time for mixed-signal systems, it is necessary to develop an efficient solution for this verification issue. For tedious system simulations, digital circuits can be verified by hardware emulation with Field-Programmable Logic Array (FPGA) to obtain significant simulation speedup. However, no similar emulation mechanism is available now for analog circuits to speed up the simulations. Users still have to spend a lot of simulation time on the verification for analog parts. Therefore, in this project, we will try to develop an analog circuit emulation technique to shorten the design and verification flow of analog circuits and support the integration verification of mixed-signal systems.Because existing analog circuit emulation techniques still have some limitations, many issues should be solved before being simulated with digital circuit emulators simultaneously. Therefore, in this project, we propose to use the Wave Digital Filter (WDF) theorems on analog circuit emulation. We will automatically transform all analog components to the corresponding WDF netlist and synthesize them onto digital FPGA because WDFs are basically digital filter circuits. For this special application, we will also develop a series of CAD tools for the design and optimization of the synthesized WDF circuits to improve the efficiency of mixed-signal system verification. With this new technique, the mature digital emulation techniques can be applied to solve the analog circuit emulation problem with full EDA tool supports. Furthermore, the analog circuit emulation and digital circuit emulation can be integrated easily and smoothly with this technique. This analog circuit emulation platform can certainly save considerable simulation time for analog circuits and eliminate the verification bottleneck of mixed-signal systems.