Behavioural simulation of mixed analogue/digital circuits.

Continuing improvements in integrated circuit technology have made possible the implementation of complex electronic systems on a single chip. This often requires both analogue and digital signal processing. It is essential to simulate such IC's during the design process to detect errors at an early stage. Unfortunately, the simulators that are currently available are not well-suited to large mixed-signal circuits. This thesis describes the design and development of a new methodology for simulating analogue and digital components in a single, integrated environment. The methodology represents components as behavioural models that are more efficient than the circuit models used in conventional simulators. The signals that flow between models are all represented as piecewise-linear (PWL) waveforms. Since models representing digital and analogue components use the same format to represent their signals, they can be directly connected together. An object-oriented approach was used to create a class hierarchy to implement the component models. This supports rapid development of new models since all models are derived from a common base class and inherit the methods and attributes defined in their parentc lassesT. he signal objectsa re implementedw ith a similar class hierarchy. The development and validation of models representing various digital, analogue and mixed-signal components are described. Comparisons are made between the accuracy and performance of the proposed methodology and several commercial simulators. The development of a Windows-based demonstrations imulation tool called POISE is also described. This permitted models to be tested independently and multiple models to be connected together to form structural models of complex circuits

High-level modelling languages

This paper gives an introduction to the latest developments in modern electronic design methodology. It will give a brief history of the evolution of design software in an attempt to explain the seemingly haphazard development up to the present-day situation

On mixed abstraction, languages and simulation approach to refinement with SystemC AMS

Executable specifications and simulations arecornerstone to system design flows. Complex mixed signalembedded systems can be specified with SystemC AMSwhich supports abstraction and extensible models of computation. The language contains semantics for moduleconnections and synchronization required in analog anddigital interaction. Through the synchronization layer, user defined models of computation, solvers and simulators can be unified in the SystemC AMS simulator for achieving low level abstraction and model refinement. These improvements assist in amplifying model aspects and their contribution to the overall system behavior. This work presents cosimulating refined models with timed data flow paradigm of SystemC AMS. The methodology uses Cbased interaction between simulators. An RTL model ofdata encryption standard is demonstrated as an example.The methodology is flexible and can be applied in earlydesign decision trade off, architecture experimentation and particularly for model refinement and critical behavior analysis

Smart Bolometer: Toward Monolithic Bolometer with Smart Functions

The content of this chapter refers to uncooled resistive bolometers amd the challenge that consists in their integration into monolithic devices exhibiting smart functions. Uncooled resistive bolometers are the essential constitutive element of the majority of existing uncooled infrared imaging systems; they are referred to as microbolometer pixels in that type of application where matrixes of such elementary devices are used. uncooled bolometers represent more than 95% of the market of infrared imaging systems in 2010 (yole 2010) and infrared imaging systems are required for more and more applications

Qucs workbook

This document is intended to be a work book for RF and microwave designers.Our intention is not to provide an RF course, but some touchy RF topics. The goal is to insist on design rules and work flow for RF design using CAD programs. This work flow will be handled through different subjects

A Holistic Approach to Functional Safety for Networked Cyber-Physical Systems

Functional safety is a significant concern in today's networked cyber-physical systems such as connected machines, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent environments. Simulation is a well-known methodology for the assessment of functional safety. Simulation models of networked cyber-physical systems are very heterogeneous relying on digital hardware, analog hardware, and network domains. Current functional safety assessment is mainly focused on digital hardware failures while minor attention is devoted to analog hardware and not at all to the interconnecting network. In this work we believe that in networked cyber-physical systems, the dependability must be verified not only for the nodes in isolation but also by taking into account their interaction through the communication channel. For this reason, this work proposes a holistic methodology for simulation-based safety assessment in which safety mechanisms are tested in a simulation environment reproducing the high-level behavior of digital hardware, analog hardware, and network communication. The methodology relies on three main automatic processes: 1) abstraction of analog models to transform them into system-level descriptions, 2) synthesis of network infrastructures to combine multiple cyber-physical systems, and 3) multi-domain fault injection in digital, analog, and network. Ultimately, the flow produces a homogeneous optimized description written in C++ for fast and reliable simulation which can have many applications. The focus of this thesis is performing extensive fault simulation and evaluating different functional safety metrics, \eg, fault and diagnostic coverage of all the safety mechanisms