Design methods for SOC control CODECS to enhance reuse

While the conventional concept of a signal coder-decoder (CODEC) is of a homogeneous device, such that the output decoding is simply an inverse of the input decoding, the heterogeneous CODEC developed in this paper decouples the input and output decoding; this variation generalizes the system. A control CODEC is an application of a heterogeneous CODEC, which replaces a traditional discrete analog control loop. The CODEC will be shown to have the ability to be optimized for a specific application as well as to be re-targeted to different fabrication lines. Because of the environmental demands on space-borne devices several stable radiation-hardened (rad-hard), silicon-on-insulator (SOI), BiCMOS processes were used. The MIT Lincoln Labs AST Fully Depleted SOI (FDSOI) deep-submicron process was also used as an example of re-targeting. Our technology independent methodology implements a deliberate mixed-signal design decomposition, which enhances analog and mixed-signal block reuse.