Towards mixed analog/digital design automation: a review

The state of the art in design automation for analog and mixed analog-digital circuits is reviewed. Emphasis is given to the areas of physical assembly, synthesis, and silicon compilation. Several notable aspects of the problem, such as mixed mode or multilevel simulation, modeling, and testability, albeit important, are beyond the scope of this paper and are not reviewed. The approaches are examined separately for the cases of analog circuits and mixed signal circuits. For each of these categories, the CAD tools are discussed first, followed by synthesis and compilation activities