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Improving Analog Design Methodology
| Abstract: |
This talk with describe some of the work being done as part of the Rethinking Analog Design (RAD) effort at Stanford, on analog design tools and methodology. The past 30 years have seen an enormous growth in the power and sophistication of digital design tools, while progress in analog tools has been much more modest. Worse, these tools have completely different underlying assumptions, which make building and validating mixed signal designs difficult. To address these issues we first explore what is different about analog circuits and what is needed to create reusable analog components. This will lead to a discussion of circuit book, our design for a repository of circuits and validation scripts to make it easier to both reuse components and create new ones. Next we turn to the problem of creating higher-level analog design abstractions, focusing in particular on validation of mixed signal systems.
The key is to realize that while analog circuits are not linear, we use linear systems or their deviations from linear system to describe them. Using this information opens up a wide range of tool possibilities, from creating a reusable library of analog cells, "formal" checking of analog functional models to circuit implementations, to dealing with the effects of process variation. As part of this talk I will describe some of the tools, implemented and planned, that leverage these ideas.
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| Speaker: |
Prof. Mark Horowitz - Stanford University |
| Speaker Bio: |
 Mark Horowitz received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1978, and his PhD from Stanford in 1984. Since 1984 he has been a professor at Stanford working in the area of digital integrated circuit design. While at Stanford he has led a number of processor designs including: MIPS-X, one of the first processors to include an on-chip instruction cache; Torch, a statically-scheduled, superscalar processor; Flash, a flexible DSM machine; and Smash, a reconfigurable polymorphic manycore processor. He has also worked in a number of other chip design areas including high-speed memory design, high-bandwidth interfaces, and fast floating point. In 1990 he took leave from Stanford to help start Rambus Inc, a company designing high-bandwidth memory interface technology. |
| Poster Link: |
Poster |
| Presentation: |
Presentation on 11/10/2010 (PDF)
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