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ANALOG VERIFICATION INSIGHTS


Automatic Generation of SystemVerilog Models from Analog/Mixed-Signal Circuits: a Pipelined ADC Example

September 15, 2021    6:00 PM – 7:00 PM PDT

When verifying large SoC designs, one needs to write SystemVerilog models for analog/mixed-signal circuit blocks to comply with the digital verification flow, such as UVM. This talk addresses ways to extract those models automatically from circuits.

The first approach is called structural modeling, mapping each device in the circuit to an equivalent model in SystemVerilog and connecting them up as they are in the original circuit. While this guarantees correct-by-construction models, the improvement in the simulation speed is limited due to the low abstraction level of the models.

The second approach is called functional modeling, aiming to raise the abstraction level of the models. One can select a part of the circuit and map it to one of the predefined model templates to generate its functional model. Although it requires some manual inputs, the resulting models can deliver significantly faster and even more accurate simulations than the structural models.

Question is, how many model templates would be necessary to model analog circuits? This talk shares my journey to answer this. I will use a pipelined analog-to-digital converter (ADC) example to demonstrate these different approaches.


Prof. Jaeha Kim

Seoul National University (SNU)

Jaeha Kim is currently Professor at Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea, and founded Scientific Analog, Inc. in 2015. He is pursuing ways to make analog design as efficient as digital design.
Prof. Kim received the B.S. degree from SNU in 1997, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 1999 and 2003, respectively. He is a recipient of the Takuo Sugano Award for Outstanding Far-East Paper at 2005 ISSCC and is cited as Top 100 Technology Leader by the National Academy of Engineering of Korea in 2020.