Monitoring AMS Simulation: From Assertions to Features

The complexity of analog mixed-signal (AMS) designs motivates the designers to analyze these systems in terms of features, which can be defined as the characterizing behavioral attributes of the designs. The first step towards automating the evaluation of feature values is to express the feature definitions in a formal way, and then to evaluate them over behavioral signatures. In this paper we present a framework for evaluating feature values over standard simulation platforms. Case studies over several circuit families are presented to illustrate the proposed methodology.