Digital Place and Route in a Custom Design Environment

Mixing digital automation with analog customization to provide a state-of-the-art mixed-signal design flow

There is a category of high-end integrated circuits (ICs) – often referred to as "analog-on-top" since the top level description is a SPICE netlist – that predominantly comprise analog circuitry augmented with blocks of digital functionality. Until recently, these digital blocks were relatively small, each typically containing only a few tens, hundreds, or (sometimes) thousands of logic cells. Such blocks were often handcrafted by the analog designers using traditional custom design capture and layout technologies.

In today's increasingly complex systems, however, it is now common for predominantly analog ICs to contain a substantial number of digital blocks, and for each of these blocks to contain large quantities of logic cells, all the way up to 50,000 instances or more. Although such gate counts would be considered to be relatively small in a purely digital design environment, they are extremely significant in the context of a custom design environment. It is no longer possible to handle digital blocks of this size and complexity using conventional design and layout techniques. In order to address this issue, SpringSoft has augmented its Laker™ Custom Layout Automation System with two new controllable automation engines – the Laker Custom Row Placer and the Laker Custom Digital Router – to enable a faster, more efficient design flow.

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