Automation accelerates analogue design reuse projects by up to 50%

Sowmyan Rajagopalan, Thalia Founder and CTO, commented: “Process migration - moving IP between foundries or process nodes - is one of the biggest challenges facing analogue IP providers today, and schematic porting is a key part of that process. The AMALIA schematic porting capability provides all the support an experienced analogue designer needs: automating where possible, but also providing analysis and direction to make the task quicker and easier overall.”

Schematic porting is one of the key steps for designers wishing to move analogue IP between different foundry providers or process nodes. Integrating with existing AMALIA design centering capabilities, the new tool suggests candidate porting solutions based on key design properties - such as device width/length; technology limitations such as minimum/maximum permissible device dimensions and area constraints; and design constraints.

As well as automating the porting process, the AMALIA Design Suite also significantly increases designer productivity by providing a detailed analysis highlighting issues that require the expertise of an experienced analogue design engineer.

The AMALIA porting capability encompasses device mapping, target process rules/constraints, algorithms for schematic layout and an error checker. It includes algorithms to maintain W/L, transconductance (gm) ratios and total capacitance and resistance values in light of area constraints. It also inspects interconnect and terminal locations, ‘rewiring’ the design to address any shorts.

The schematic porting capability has already played a key role in accelerating migration projects for a number of customers in the RF and power management sector, notably as part of Thalia’s partnership with Catena.

This partnership, which leverages Thalia’s combination of design automation technology and analogue expertise, dramatically reduces the time, cost and resources required for Catena to make its IP available in alternative foundry processes. Catena estimates savings of between 40% and 50% for recently completed migration projects.

The AMALIA analogue design automation tool suite integrates with the Cadence analogue design flow, accepting inputs via the industry-standard Component Description Format (CDF). AMALIA schematic porting tools will be commercially available in Q4 2019.