The PRAISE approach for accelerated transient analysis applied to wire models

Abstract

Continuously shrinking design sizes and the integration of digital and analog blocks in a single IC are clearly identifiable trends in today's microelectronics industry. As both trends increase design complexity and concurrently make the outcome of manufacturing processes less predictable, manufacturing yield is potentially endangered. As a countermeasure, new methodologies for the simulation of mixed-signal-circuits are required. In this paper, we describe a new simulation kernel for the previously presented PRAISE methodology. It accelerates the transient simulation of analog mixed-signal systems by generating and employing abstract circuit models during runtime. We apply the methodology to wire models and discuss results and runtime behavior of different implementations. Furthermore, we present an automated XML-based approach at interfacing PRAISE with arbitrary simulation environments using SystemC.