Joint simulation of mixed-signal integrated circuits and printed circuit boards

As system complexities and the market share of mixed signal products increase, design and test of integrated circuits (ICs) will become more difficult. This indicates that design of printed circuit boards (PCBs) for test must be integrated into the IC development flows. We propose software supported model translation to enable a method of joint simulation of a PCB and an IC in an integrated environment. The method employed can be shown to increase model coverage to more than 90 % for analog time domain models from some of the largest component suppliers. The benefits of this are demonstrated through analog simulations that reuse existing testbenches for an IC, uncovering potentially unstable transient effects arising from the combination of the IC and PCB.