On how to migrate a design to a new technology, at the schematic level

Discussion in 'Cadence' started by spectrallypure, Nov 6, 2007.

  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,

    Jorge Luis.
     
    spectrallypure, Nov 6, 2007
    #1
Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments (here). After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.