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 Japan semiconductor industry consortium – of which member companies are Fujitsu Semiconductor, Panasonic, Renesas Electronics, Rohm, Sony and Toshiba.
Now, model-based design using Matlab and Simulink can be incorporated by participant member companies as a pre-qualified system level platform in the standard semiconductor design and verification flows of their 'mixed-signal' design project.
The STARCAD-AMS approach standardises the analogue/mixed-signal ASIC design flow and eases migration between system-level design and circuit-level design through a prescribed inter-design 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 per cent.
