Projects1
This turn key IC development program was a servo, power management, and flash memory interface IC intended for use in small form(1” & 1.8”) HDD’s. ICDSN negotiated the semiconductor development contract, designed 100% of the analog and power management circuits and embedded a 10K gate digital ASIC coded by the OEM. The design contained IP elements; reference, opamps, comparators, voltage regulation, switch capacitor DC-DC converters, 3 phase brushless motor driver, voice coil motor driver, multiple 12 bit D/A’s, a 10 A/D, and OTP based EPROM.
This IC was released to production in less than 1 year. The device reached defect limited yield is less than 6 months and shipped in high volume for more than three years.
Our customer, a major semiconductor company, was developing a mixed signal IC for an international wireless company. The IC contains several DC-DC converters that operated over wide load ranges. The customer wanted to investigate control systems that could optimize system performance. The controller was required to automatic detect and select a power optimized control mode. Simulation time using physical circuit components consumed massive amounts of computing resources and designer time. IC Design provided a VerilogA based hybrid model( part physical components, part code) that included different control techniques(PFM, Hysteretic, constant off time, constant on time, fixed frequency, etc.) in transient mode simulation and switched under simulation control. Simulation time was reduced to less that one hour per evaluation cycle. The VerilogA model also captured and recorded simulation to reduce performance evaluation time. After the final design was completed, the physical design was compared to the model with nearly identical results.
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