Towards a Mixed-signal SoC Platform

The designers cannot keep pace with the technology, which provides such massive amount of transistors. Time-to-market pressure and increased design complexity created what it is called a "design gap" [1]. As a solution to that problem the Platform-Based Design (PBD), based on the design-reuse methodology, has been proposed [2], [3]. Furthermore, time-to-market pressure and the masks’ ownership cost drive us to more disciplined design styles. Figure 2 presents the natural evolution of design methodologies through time. Moreover, it is true that in the System-on-Chip (SoC) design the analog part dominates the overall design time, cost and risk. The I/O interfacing by analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters (ADC’s/DAC’s) is a necessary part of every SoC system that has to communicate with the real (analog) world. In this paper we propose the Mixed-signal FPGA (FPMA) platform as a solution to the described above problems. The FPMA platform is an extension of the purely digital FPGA platform with additional analog functions such as ADC’s/DAC’s, anti-alias filters, etc. Specifically, we present the feasibility of an ADC platform, based on the use of identical basic building blocks and we demonstrate several possible ADC architectures.