An effective AMS top-down methodology applied to the design of a mixed-signal UWB system-on-chip

  • Authors:

  • Marco Crepaldi;Mario R. Casu;Mariagrazia Graziano;Maurizio Zamboni

  • Affiliations:

  • VLSI Laboratory, Politecnico di Torino, Italy;VLSI Laboratory, Politecnico di Torino, Italy;VLSI Laboratory, Politecnico di Torino, Italy;VLSI Laboratory, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The design of Ultra Wideband (UWB) mixed-signal SoC for localization applications in wireless personal area networks is currently investigated by several researchers. The complexity of the design claims for effective top-down methodologies. We propose a layered approach based on VHDL-AMS for the first design stages and on an intelligent use of a circuit-level simulator for the transistor-level phase. We apply the latter just to one block at a time and wrap it within the system-level VHDL-AMS description. This method allows to capture the impact of circuit-level design choices and non-idealities on system performance. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology we show how the refinement of the design affects specific UWB system parameters such as bit-error rate and localization estimations.