Public Funding for Thalia Design Automation Ltd

Analogue and mixed analogue/digital integrated circuits (ICs) form key parts of many electronic systems that are in daily use in multiple technology areas including communications (such as mobile telephones and Wi-Fi), control systems, auotomotive and medical applications. Design of digital integrated circuits is supported by established Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, however there are few automated EDA tools available to support the analogue design process. Design of analogue circuits currently requires highly skilled electronics engineers, design is time consuming (accounting for up to 40% of design time) and costly. A typical medium sized analogue circuit can cost in excess of £500,000 to prototype . Subsequent transfer or porting of designs to new manufacturing processes is also similarly time consuming and costly. The current design methodology is impacting the speed at which new electronic products and innovations, especially in the communications sector, can reach market. Analogue integrated circuit design methods have barely changed and it remains a labourious iterative design process requiring highly skilled specialist input from electrical design engineers. As a consequence these specialist engineering skills are in correspondingly short supply. Semiconductor design houses spend many weeks and months in designing, porting, and re-spinning (re-design) activities. So there is a real need , and a commercial opportunity, for a new alternative automated solution that will facilitate faster optimised analogue design. This project builds on the result of a successful Smart Proof of Concept project in which innovative advanced techniques were researched and tested. This project takes those techniques and develops them into a functioning software tool for beta testing with end users.

Power devices are the biggest components in a Analogue semiconductor chip. These devices have a number of components i.e interconnects, transistors and need to be designed, analysed and constructured correctly to meet the design and technology contraints. Electronic design automation system that assists an user to design, analyse and develop these components would be very beneficial to a design house.

Analogue and Radio Frequency (RF) integrated circuits (ICs) are a key component of many electronic systems and are used in many applications including communications (such as mobile telephones and Wi-Fi), control systems, and medical applications to name a few. These circuits can account for up to 40% of time and cost in designing a new analogue or mixed analogue/ digital ICs, and are responsible for over 50% of design iterations or functionality changes (re-spins). Circuit designs are frequently transferred to new production processes (or to smaller production processes) for cost or efficiency purposes or to add new functionality both of which will require redesign and re-spins as such changes can cause circuits to fail to perform as they did before. Semiconductor design houses spend many person days/months in designing, porting, and re-spinning activities. Due to a lack of automated tools this is a labour intensive process requiring manual intervention and multiple design iterations, with correspondingly significant cost and time issues. Analogue circuit design requires specialist skills which are in short supply; analogue design methodology has barely changed and still revolves around an iterative design process. There is little in the way of automated Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools to support the design process, furthermore automation of the porting of analogue circuit designs is almost non-existent. This project will attempt to address these issues by researching algorithms and methods that will facilitate the research and development of a software tool which will address these problems and facilitate automated design of, and porting of, analogue circuits. The eventual aim of the project is a tool that will be an add-on to existing design software used in the industry, which will maximise commercial potential by not requiring end users to change their existing EDA software tools and design processes.