Mentor Mounts A/M-S Offense : New platform bets on wireless

Electronic News, Oct 25, 1999 by Gale Morrison

Mentor Graphics Corp. this week is bringing out a new platform of tools for system-on-a-chip (SOC) design that takes the huge impact of wireless communications - and so the need for RF and analog integration - firmly into account.

Mentor's market research says that while mixed signal ICs are 22 percent of the total new designs this year, by 2005 that percentage will be 67 percent. What's driving that? The 3G, or third-generation, wideband wireless communication technology, which is the very same driver for Intel's recent wireless binge and a hundred other business strategies that are picking up steam.

"We realize there is a transportation sector. We realize there are medical devices this complex. But this (3G) is the technology driver," said Karl Lange, marketing director for analog/mixed signal (A/M-S) at Mentor. "We saw this coming."

Mentor's new ADVanc platform has the recently finalized IEEE VHDL-AMS standard as its core, in combination with other industry standard formats. The first two tools are ADVance MS--a simulator--and ADVance RFIC, for radio frequency (RF) design. A key attraction will be CommLib, a VHDL-AMS-based telecom and data communication library, which a dedicated Mentor group in Cairo has compiled.

The hard part will be getting designers to expand their horizons and use the new VHDL-AMS, which is actually a superset of VHDL, meant to allow mixed signal design, Mentor said.

"We're going to have to bootstrap people into this world ... people, designers, don't like to leave their comfort zone," Lange said. That's why Mentor is doing a few things to proliferate the platform and knowledge base. CommLib will be free for six months (it gives designers access to 230 telco functions), several seminars are to be held for academia and industry research and the Cairo group's expertise will be easily available.

It may be as good a time as any to nudge designers into this world. The major challenge for 3G mixed signal IC design, Lange said, is to efficiently merge three basic design methodologies - digital, analog and radio frequency - into one, streamlined verification environment.

Mentor has already won half the battle, since wireless phone super giant Nokia of Finland is on board for VHDL-AMS.

"We believe that VHDL-AMS is the right language in the design of mixed signal ASICs," said Roger Holden, senior engineer at Nokia Mobile Phones. "By integrating the VHDL-AMS description language as well as SPICE into the new ADVance MS simulation environment, Mentor Graphics is developing a valuable solution for mixed signal, mixed level IC design."