Analog subsystem simplifies integration of multiple analog IPs into ASICs

Agile Analog has launched its first range of analog subsystems, covering power management, PVT sensing, and sleep management. These innovative, digitally wrapped subsystems significantly reduce the effort required to integrate multiple analog IPs into any ASIC by allowing the IP to be dropped straight into a digital design flow and connected via a standard peripheral bus, such as AMBA APB. The subsystems look just like a normal block of digital IP with the standard interfaces that engineers would expect, making them easy to understand and handle. As a result, time to market, costs, and risk are radically reduced. Initially, the company is introducing three subsystems: agilePMU for power management, agile PVT – PVT sensor, and agileSMU for sleep management.

The IP blocks within a subsystem are all from Agile Analog’s existing portfolio of customizable analog IPs. This allows each block within the subsystem to be customized to the customer’s exact requirements whilst sitting within the overall digital wrapper. As with all Agile Analog IPs, the digitally wrapped subsystems are process and foundry-agnostic, and each design is optimized for the customer’s specific PDK. Integrating IP within a subsystem further enhances the customer’s design by removing duplicate analog functions, reducing design rule checking (DRC) requirements, and optimizing interconnects. These lead to increased noise immunity, lower power consumption, and smaller area.

Another key benefit to the customer is that all the verification requirements of the analog to digital, mixed-signal, boundary are performed by Agile Analog. This significantly reduces the customer design and verification time, de-risks the design process, lowers the cost of licensing mixed-signal design tools, and simplifies integration. Customers can now add analog features to provide product differentiation without needing specialist analog and mixed-signal engineers, and the associated costly toolchain.

Agile Analog’s subsystems are supplied with a full set of supporting collateral, including System Verilog models for easy integration into customers’ existing digital verification flows.