A time eater
Phones, computers, TVs, headphones, fridges, pacemakers, insulin pumps, MRI scanners, satellites. None of these things would work without integrated circuits (ICs). ICs are everywhere around you, and without them our lives would look vastly different.
But our dependency on ICs does not come without issues.
Design of analog integrated circuits is highly time-consuming. The process involves manually tweaking transistor parameters and running simulations, often repeated thousands of times.
This easily takes from several hours to weeks per analog block. As a complete IC design comprises hundreds of these blocks, months to years of work is required.
This extensive time requirement prolongs time-to-market and demands substantial resources in terms of skilled engineers.
To save time, compromises in design are made, which can lead to reduced performance and increased power losses. This makes the analog circuit design one of the most critical and costly bottlenecks in modern IC design. Since analog circuits exist in every modern IC, the value of an improved workflow is immense.
Saving time
In the InnoExplorer project Analog Integrated Circuit Automation (AICA), Dahl has developed an optimization algorithm that can determine the best values for any analog and mixed signal circuit block with a minimum amount of iterations.
When designing a circuit you need to run hundreds if not thousands of simulations to figure out how the circuit will act – this will quickly become a very time demanding process.
Dahl’s solution can intelligently select which simulations are necessary and thereby complete designs in about 20 simulations, making it 10-100 times faster than what is commercially available today. As a result, the design of each analog circuit block can be completed in a matter of minutes saving hours of work for every designed block.
The goal with AICA is to transition from an advanced prototype to a functioning product that can be commercialized. Three major tasks are needed to achieve this: Expanding the team, Gaining feedback from potential customers, and a whole lot of programming.
