A JAVA-Based Mixed-Signal Design Environment

The increasing importance of mixed-signal design among today's and tomorrow's hardware systems brings up new challenges in the field of design tool construction. We present a newly developed VHDL-AMS design environment. The environment consists of a VHDL-AMS compiler, a VHDL-AMS elaborator and a simulation framework. This simulation framework contains a digital kernel and an analog kernel using an interface to MATLAB for solving the analog equations. Except for the interface to MATLAB, the whole environment is implemented in JAVA. This implementation language was chosen to gain platform independence. The environment has an open architecture which provides good capabilities for research in the field of mixed-signal simulation.