Dynamically Reconfigurable Analog Circuit Design Automation Through Multiobjective Optimization and Direct Execution

Fast analog circuit design and rapid prototyping is increasingly required in mixed-signal designs to keep pace with the digital part in order to meet stringent time to market constraints. In order to achieve these goals heavy reliance on analog design automation and prototyping platforms is required. This paper presents an analog circuit multiobjective design methodology combined with a reconfigurable analog platform. The complete prototyping system is composed of Field-Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAAs) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) on which the synthesized designs are implemented and validated in order to optimize the desired analog circuit. Compared with simulation based methodologies important gains in total design time are achieved. We applied this methodology on a case study of a rejecter filter.

1. Introduction

System on chip increasingly are composed of analog/mixed-signal technologies especially in wireless communications applications. Although rapid prototyping of large scale digital circuits/systems is commonly applied based on large scale FPGA devices little have been achieved so far on rapid prototyping of analog circuits. However, rapid prototyping is not only an important method for design validation but increasingly for large scale designs might become the only validation technique due tounacceptable simulation times. When significant design space exploration is considered the problem of simulation times is of course heavily exacerbated and become the main bottleneck. The direct consequences are a drastic reduction of the potential design space and reliance on design space exploration ad hoc methods.