Towards high level synthesis of mixed signal ASICs
This chapter has described an advanced computer assisted design environment which employs high-level symbolic tools capable of analysing and supporting the synthesis of system architectures defined in terms of specific functional building blocks as well as the architectures of such functional building blocks defined in terms of circuit components. It has presented the general organization of a design environment, including a brief discussion of the strategy for multi-level communication and flow of information which was adopted in order to efficiently integrate such tools and thus provide high flexibility for designing mixed analogue-digital ASICs. We have also introduced the concept of synthesisers which employ a coherent, common framework for the synthesis and analysis of networks implementing different functions, each of which can also be realised using multiple topologies. Essential to such multi-function multi-topology synthesisers is the capability of automatically generating symbolic transfer functions from a given circuit description, and which was also addressed for the case of z-domain transfer functions generated from SFG's representing the operation of SC networks. Finally, we presented a knowledge-based system for designing at the architecture level SC filters based on multiple methodologies, and gave a detailed example corresponding to the methodology based on the cascade of SC biquads.
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