Fundamentals of Analog Verification

We live in an analog world and yet analog has always been treated as the poor step-sister. It is given the tasks that digital does not want or cannot do and the developers of these pieces often have little or no help in terms of tools or automation. But there are many changes happening in the analog domain. First, analog can no longer be segregated into a corner with large amounts of shielding around it. Analog blocks are now being tightly integrated with the digital pieces. Second, the task of analog design is getting a lot more complex due to shrinking geometries. In the functional design of digital systems this hardly represents a blip on the radar, but it has huge impacts on the analog parts. The third change is that chips contain more analog than ever before and there just aren’t enough analog experts to do all of the work. New hands are required and often times, they do not have the same levels of experience as the old hands. This can create a whole new set of problems.
In this course we look at some of the best practices in use today for both functional and physical verification and then we will explore a whole new area of development for physical verification that could transform the way in which analog is verified. This will be demonstrated using technology contained within Mentor Graphics’ Calibre tool suite.