IC Design And Verification In Flow For RF Analog And Digital Integration

Applications such as WLAN, Bluetooth, 3G, Gigabit Ethernet, and portable communications devices are fueling the demand for advanced Mixed Signal/RFCMOS semiconductors. Requirements for lower cost, lighter weight and longer battery life drive greater functional integration leading to sophisticated single-chip solutions. Modern portable consumer electronic systems, for example, combine high digital content for advanced user experience with high analog and radio frequency resources for connectivity to remote systems and services. This results in complex System on Chip solutions that combine mixed-signal circuits, embedded high-performance analog and sensitive RF front-end blocks together with complex digital circuitry on the same chip.

UMC delivers advanced SoC solutions that address the needs of communications and networking industries for high-performance and low power digital and analog circuits. UMC has paid particular attention to the sensitive analog and RF circuits that are critical to the success of an IC design project. Addressing the analog section of the system with rigor can eliminate costly re-spins. To ensure high yield, the analog blocks must be as robust as the digital blocks and must take into account analog nonlinearities, parametric yield and process variations. Complexities in achieving this robustness force design organizations to search for new technologies and methods to deliver solutions that are rigorous and reliable. Of critical importance is the design flow and modeling for custom integrated circuits that include RF circuits on the analog front-end, analog and mixed-signal circuits at baseband, and digital signal processing on the back-end. UMC and Ansoft have teamed to develop a design solution for complex systems that include custom RF and analog circuits. UMC's advanced RF CMOS semiconductor process combined with electronic design automation (EDA) tools from Ansoft and other established vendors provide the platform upon which advanced SoCs can be developed. New capability is added to the Cadence RFIC design flow by adding Ansoft's advanced technology of the Nexxim® circuit simulator and High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS®) 3D electromagnetic simulator.

The design Flow for RF, Analog, and Digital Integration (FRADI) has been created to provide a reference for RF SoC development. This joint effort leverages UMC's production-proven 0.13 um RFCMOS process for mixed-signal SoCs with advanced circuit simulation and electromagnetic extraction tools from Ansoft. This document describes RF and analog design and verification in the FRADI reference flow. Circuits from an ongoing project to develop an ultrawideband (UWB) multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexed (MBOFDM) radio will be used as the vehicle to demonstrate the flow.

SOURCE: Ansoft LLC