CUTTING EDGE DANISH START-UP DESIGNS SIGNAL CONDITIONING ASICs USING TANNER
"The Tanner solution has proven itself as the right choice and we understand that planned enhancements should ensure that it remains very cost-effective for customers like us." Claus Fürst Co-Founder and CTO, AudioASICS
Michael Deruginsky and Claus Fürst founded AudioASICS, a Danish start-up near Copenhagen, in July 2003 and launched the first engineering samples of their next generation signal conditioning ASICs less than a year later in January 2004. These ASICs go inside communications microphone housings as bare die, flip-chip or wafer level (CSP) packages and provide greater sensitivity than their analog counterparts, improved signal-to-noise performance and, where required, digital output via an on-chip A/D converter. They enable smaller microphone elements to be used and, by putting more signal processing into the microphone itself, free-up resources in other system DSPs.
Speed to Market Mission Critical
Informed observers forecast a market of some 750 million microphones requiring such ASICs by 2007, with a further 100 million or more devices going into miniature loudspeakers with similar circuit elements and the addition of a Class D driver. With such a large potential market to be captured and time-to-market a major issue, AudioASICS needed design tools that could deliver all the power and functionality necessary to capture their revolutionary ideas in an easy to use environment, but on a start-up sized budget. Tanner EDA came to their rescue.
"We recognized that tools from the larger EDA companies could offer all of the functionality we needed and more," said Fürst, Chief Technology Officer at AudioASICS. "To some extent that's part of the problem, they were just too complex for our requirements. After reviewing the available options, I would say that such tools only offered us about 10% more useful functionality but at 10 to 20 times the cost of alternatives from Tanner."
The Challenge: Simple Design With Complex Performance Goals
The challenge facing this small company was to create full-custom, mixed-signal ASICs for 0.35 micron CMOS processes. The buffer, pre-amplifier and A/D converter consists of several hundred transistors in a mixed-signal design. This is a simple design in terms of number of transistors, but the complexity comes from how they have to be tied together to achieve performance goals.
In considering their options, the company reviewed offerings from a number of EDA companies. There were four key requirements:
The Right Choice: Tanner EDA
AudioASICS finally settled on a combination of tools from Tanner EDA, including Tanner T-Spice Pro for circuit simulation, schematic entry and waveform analysis, together with Tanner L-Edit layout and verification software.
The combination of Tanner tools not only met the original EDA specification but added some further advantages. "Our full custom ASICs don't involve third-party IP as we design our own transistors to optimize performance in the application. This is labor-intensive, but the Tanner tools enable us to develop analog building blocks in both the schematic and physical domains. We can then re-use these blocks across a range of design variants and again in future products," said Fürst.
In addition, device generators in L-Edit Pro allow the option for AudioASICS to move between foundries, so they are not locked in to a single supplier. This ensures maximum flexibility, productivity and competitiveness when it comes to producing the silicon.
Tanner EDA in the Future
As AudioASICS plans more ambitious and complex products in the future, it has confidence that Tanner EDA will continue to keep pace with their needs. According to Fürst "The Tanner solution has proven itself as the right choice and we understand that planned enhancements should ensure that it remains very cost-effective for customers like us."