Resistor capacitor oscillator IP eases analogue circuits onto ASICs
Analogue IP company, Agile Analog has announced a resistor capacitor (RC) oscillator at the Design Automation Conference in San Francisco, California, USA (10 to 14 July 2022). It is the first in a new family of analogue IP blocks that the company is launching, designed to make the integration of analogue circuits onto ASICs “very easy”.
The IP is part of the library of analogue IP circuits that Agile Analog’s automatic solution generator, Composa, uses to create IP blocks that exactly match a customer’s requirements, explained Barry Paterson, Agile Analog’s CEO. “Their modular design means that they can be combined together to form sub-system solutions speeding up design times and reducing risk as they have all been thoroughly tested and verified.”
The agileOSC RC is based on a traditional architecture which allows the frequency to be trimmed to remove the effects of process variation. It can also be configured as a free running clock (FRC) where a high accuracy clock is not required. With a start-up time of typically 10 microseconds, it has a frequency range of 20kHz to 100MHz with an accuracy of up to + five per cent. It has a low power consumption of typically 100 microA at 10MHz which is much less than an equivalent discrete analogue component, said the company and highlights the benefit of integrating analogue circuits onto the main chip.
Traditionally, analogue IP blocks have to be manually redesigned for each application and process technology but Agile Analog’s Composa automatically generates analogue IP to meet the customer’s specifications and process technology. Composa uses tried and tested analogue IP circuits from its library. According to Agile Analog, the ‘design once and re-use many times’ model of digital IP now applies to analogue IP for the first time. The analogue IP circuits in the Composa library have been extensively tested and used in previous designs, and are fully validated every time they are generated. This gives a similar level of reassurance to the digital IP world’s ‘silicon-proven’ said Agile Analog.
All the major foundries are supported including TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung Foundry and SMIC.
