A formal approach for specification-driven AMS behavioral model generation

Abstract

Behavioral models for analog and mixed signal (AMS) designs are developed at various levels of abstraction, using various types of languages, to cater to a wide variety of requirements, ranging from verification, design space exploration, test generation, and application demonstration. In this paper we present a high-level formalism for capturing the AMS design intent from the specification and present techniques for automatic generation of AMS behavioral models. The proposed formalism is a language independent one, yet the design intent is modeled at a level of abstraction which enables easy translation into common modeling standards. We demonstrate the translation into VerilogA and SPICE, which are fundamentally different standards for behavioral modeling. The proposed approach is demonstrated using a family of Low Dropout Regulators (LDO) as the reference.