Panel: The world is going… analog & mixed-signal! What about EDA?

Contrarily to a common belief, the world is not going digital! Analog and mixed-signal electronics is more and more important and yet pervasive. This is due both to the increasing systems integration, by nature leading to heterogeneity, and to the complex, digital computing functions being complemented by scores of on-chip analog functions, interfacing/interacting with people, environment, and other systems. Specialty silicon foundries are now stable members of top ten revenue rankings. This technology trend demands for more design automation in both implementation and verification domains. Lossless interfaces between digital and analog design environments, multi-technology support, mixed-signal simulation engines — but also debugging aids — are no longer a nice to have. According to IBS [1], the cost of implementing and verifying the mixed-signal functions is generally over 50% of the design costs even though the mixed-signal transistors can be as low as 3% of the total! What are the critical requirement, moving forward, and what is EDA industry doing to serve the needs of this increasingly important semiconductor industry segment?