Mixed-Signal Design Using Digital CAD

The paper investigates the use of the existing CAD framework for digital circuit synthesis to design and synthesize a select set of mixed-signal functions like analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversions. This approach leads to fast and low cost design of technology portable system-on-chip solutions with analog interfaces. Some circuit examples for implementation of data conversion using digital circuits are discussed, leveraging on time-domain signal processing. Some of the signal corruption mechanisms in time-domain signal processing systems are considered in order to suggest adaptations to the existing digital design flow for the synthesis of mixed-signal circuits. As an example to show that high performance data conversion circuits can be realized using low accuracy general purpose components, an ADC is designed and synthesized with the vendor supplied standard cell library in a 65 nm CMOS process. Spectre simulation results show the feasibility of employing a digital CAD framework to synthesize high performance mixed-signal circuits, by applying time-domain signal processing.