First Analog/Mixed Signal Project Results

Posted on wo 15 juni 2022 in NLnet

In a previous professional life I have been working on radiation hardened SRAM compiler design amongst other things. There I used Cadence Virtuoso for analog circuit development. It is one of the proprietary reference analog design platforms. As a hobby I was also doing open source software development enjoying the big potential development acceleration that can be seen through open source community based development. As an open source proponent I also longed for a world where analog blocks would be developed with an open source mindset.

The main driver of the open source community is IMO not the availabillity of the source itself but the process of having a whole community working on a gradual improvement of the open source code base through smaller and bigger patches. Classically analog design is a lot of times done as design to spec; e.g. the specification for a block is written down and then a circuit is designed according to this specification. When specifications are changed typically big part of the design and layout have to be redone. This methodology is not very compatible with the gradual improvement flow hinted to above.

Recently the idea of (open source) scripted analog generators has seen renewed interest (BAG: paper & github, OpenFASOC, Oceane, ...) due to the Sky130 open source PDK and the Google sponsored MPW runs. These developments are in their early development phase and it is good that different approaches are investigated so a good open source analog development methodology can grow out of these developments; including cross-pollination between the projects.

Since last year I am working on a project funded by NGI Zero PET named Analog/Mixed-Signal Library. As described on the project page, it consists on completing/extending PDKMaster to allow scalable analog generators, use the framework on selected analog circuits and get them used in a digital HDL-to-GDS ASIC flow. The focus of the project is on building the needed base framework that will allow to use the open source gradual improvement workflow also for analog circuits.

This blog post will focus on the progress on the analog circuits design. PDKMaster has been discussed in a previous post but a lot of development has been done in the mean time. This will be discussed in a follow-up post.

For the development of the PDKMaster based analog block generators four test structures were selected:

  • A voltage reference
  • A PLL (phase-locked-loop)
  • A lower precision, lower speed ADC (analog-to-digital converter)
  • A lower precision, lower speed DAC (digital-to-analog converter)

One of the selection criteria for the circuits is to not have too complex circuits and where applicable trade off performance for less analog circuit complexity. This is to ensure development can be focused on the analog block generator rather than on the needed analog design effort for the blocks itself. Once this project is finished the source code of the blocks should then be the base code on which improvements can be made.

Analog circuits scaling reports

The design of the analog block itself is done in cooperation with LIP6 at the Sorbonne Université. They are doing a more classical design of the analog blocks but with a focus on having circuit architectures that can be scaled to different technolgy nodes. They then make reports on the blocks to be used by me (e.g. Staf Verhaegen) as base for the PDKMaster based analog block generators.

Three reports are now made available:

  • Voltage reference report
  • ADC report
  • VCO report

Work is ongoing on completing the design reports on the full PLL circuit and a DAC.

Voltage Reference

The report on the voltage reference that is commonly known as a bandgap was made by Dimitri Galayko and discusses the generic design of a relatively simple bandgap circuit. The design has been tested in simulation for AMS 0.35µm and TSMC 0.18µm technology. The report is provided as a PDF file.

ADC

This report has been delivered by Marie-Minerve Louërat and Jacky Porte. It discusses a SAR (successive approximation register) ADC (analog-to-digital converter). In the PDF, the design of an 8 bit SAR ADC is done using the Oceane software is discussed together with scaling considerations.

VCO

VCO stands for voltage-controlled and is one the main subblocks in the PLL. Dimitri Galayko has now made the report on the VCO and node scalability; it is delivered again as a PDF file.

First PDKMaster based Bandgap design

Based on Dimitri's bandgap report a first version of a bandgap design using the PDKMaster framework has been done in a Sky130 python notebook. In the notebook you can find the design of the circuit and some performance analysis. This is currently a non-optimized bandgap design. Layout has been generated though and has been submitted for Sky130 MPW6 (confirmation still pending).

Currently this is a preliminary version and will be further developed to allow the user to for example trade-off between area, power consumption and accuracy. The design notebook used for the bandgap design is also very preliminary as PDKMaster is still under heavy development. As said above in a follow-up post the state of the PDKMaster development will be discussed further.

AnaMS