Analog Integrated Circuit Optimization Using Spice

Abstract

The increasing market demand on mixed systems-on-chip (SoCs) requests electronic engineers with good knowledge on both, digital and analog integrated circuits. Furthermore, the design of the analog blocks in these SoCs is usually more time consuming and harder to optimize than their digital counterparts. This paper proposes a training strategy based on Spice simulation to teach analog integrated circuit optimization. The choice of the Spice-language standard ensures the applicability of the acquired knowledge in most of the analog design fields for SoCs (e.g. signal processing, RF communications, power control). In this sense, the Spice Opus CAD tool [1] have been selected here, which is a free Berkeley Spice3 compliant simulator with optimization and XSpice [2] mixed-mode capabilities, so it can be also reused for other related syllabus like full-custom design [3] or mixed modelling [4]. In order to illustrate the proposed methodology, a circuit case study is fully developed in the following sections as a real practice example for students.