Process Migration Tools for Analog and Digital Circuits

Abstract

The rapid progress in CMOS VLSI technologies together with the shortening time-to-market constraints of a competitive market and the shortage of designers necessitates the use of computer-aided design (CAD) tools for the automatic porting of existing designs from one technology process to another. Both horizontal and vertical technology porting are considered, where during vertical porting the intrinsically better capabilities of the new process can be exploited to either improve the performance of the circuit, or to keep the same performance while reducing power and/or chip area consumption. This paper presents CAD techniques for the automatic porting of both analog and digital circuits. Both the circuit resizing and the layout regeneration are discussed. For the circuit resizing, a scaling step is followed by a finetuning step. For the layout regeneration, a template-based approach is suggested. Experimental results illustrate the capabilities of the presented methods. Finally, the importance of proper design documentation will be stressed as a necessary means to facilitate easy technology porting.