STARC consortium selects MathWorks for model-based design

MathWorks has announced that the Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Center (STARC) in Japan has selected and certified Matlab, Simulink and Embedded Coder as the preferred tools for model-based design in its new STARCAD-AMS design flow.

STARC is the Japanese semiconductor industry consortium of which member companies are Fujitsu semiconductor, Panasonic, Renesas Electronics, Rohm, Sony and Toshiba. Model-based design using Matlab and Simulink can now be incorporated as a pre-qualified system level platform by participant member companies in the standard semiconductor design and verification flows of their mixed-signal design project.

The STARCAD-AMS approach standardises the analog/mixed-signal ASIC design flow and eases migration between system-level design and circuit-level design through a prescribed interdesign tool cooperation methodology. In this improved flow, engineers perform system-level behavioural modelling and simulation in Matlab and Simulink to take advantage of extensive libraries of blocks and functions, as well as fast simulation speeds. This flow continues with automatic C-code generation with Embedded Coder and custom System Verilog extensions that interface and integrate the behavioural models in industry-standard downstream EDA tools. In an evaluation project with the new design flow - featuring model-based design and automatic code generation, and conducted on a motif circuit prepared by STARC - the development time was reduced by approximately 50%.

The STARCAD-AMS design flow uses model-based design to enable three key activities: system-level modelling and simulation of behavioural models, which allow engineers to collaborate across system-level and analog-circuit-level design; optimisation of system design parameters, by creating an analog/mixed-signal large-scale integration (LSI) design environment at the system level; automatic code generation for interfacing and integration with industry-standard downstream EDA tools, using Embedded Coder.

“Creating a workflow that streamlines system-level design for mixed-signal ASICs was a new challenge, which came with a mix of expectations and uncertainty. However, STARC was able to test and witness the high quality and flexibility of MATLAB and Simulink, which allowed us to quickly and effectively solve design issues as they arose. We are also very impressed with the quality of support and speed of response that MathWorks provided throughout the process,” said Kunihiko Tsuboi, STARC’s senior manager of mixed-signal design group R&D Department Div. 2.

“Model-based design continues to help increase collaboration, tool integration and generation of C-code across the semiconductor industry,” said Sameer Prabhu, industry director, MathWorks.

“ASIC developers across the globe can now adopt the design platform that has been tested and preapproved by STARC - one of the leading centres for semiconductor design methodology in the world. The new STARCAD-AMS design flow improvements will help engineers gain added confidence in the quality and speed of their development efforts.”