French EDA firm Coupling Wave Solutions has rolled out tools to assess noise in analogue and RF blocks on system chips.
Called WaveIntegrity, the package estimates the noise generated by on-chip digital blocks and calculates how much of this is transferred to sensitive analogue and RF sections by propagation through the integrated circuit’s substrate, interconnect and package.
“Building on our experiences, we have developed a set of tools that tackle ESI [electrical signal integrity] in an intuitive and comprehensive flow to help reduce the number of re-spins by filling the chasm between digital, analog and RF designs,” said François Clement, CTO of Coupling Wave Technology.
There are four individual tools. WaveModeller helps the analogue designer to understand and improve the immunity of an analogue block. “Once happy with the immunity, we build an abstracted model of the immunity,” Clement told EW.
WaveMapper takes-in physical interconnect and substrate characteristics. Clement said: “It generates parameters that let us model noise propagation through the chip.”
WaveLibrarian takes descriptions of the on-chip digital blocks - “standard information that is in all libraries today,” said Clement - and automatically creates an abstraction of the noise that the cell generates in its various configurations.
According to Clement, the abstractions are spectral descriptions in the frequency domain rather than the time-domain representations generated by other players.
WaveAnalyst propagates the noise models through the substrate, interconnect and package models and calculates a physical model of noise distribution. “What is new is the combination of three methods noise propagation - substrate, interconnect and package,” said Clement. “Once it has computed noise at the sensitive points identified by WaveModeller, we have a back-annotation system to see how much effect the noise will have. For example, to spurs on a VCO or the noise figure of an LNA.”
In addition, for each monitored node, WaveIntegrity lists major aggressors and their relative contribution to noise. “This, together with the ability to extract specific transfer functions between an aggressor and its target, offers an effective way to fix all ESI issues in systems integrating analog and RF blocks,” said the firm.