Managing Complexity And A Left Shift: Reconfigurable Mixed-Signal Circuits For Complex Integrated Systems

Strategies to tackle the long development times and high costs involved in designing and verifying analog components:
The chip market is growing worldwide; it’s projected to nearly double by 2030 to over one trillion dollars. Most of this market is made up of digital functions in the form of logic, microprocessors, and memory. Although analog ICs account for only around 15% of the total, they are key components for overall systems and are therefore almost always present. In particular, they provide power management and enable special functions in the communications, automotive, and industrial sectors, among others. This article takes a closer look at the role of analog or mixed-signal circuits. One trend that leaps to the eye is how value creation takes place at the system level: the relatively small analog IP market contrasts with a much larger market for analog ICs. The reasons for this can be found in digitalization itself: analog signal processing is the basis for digital sensors and actuators, and it always forms the bridge between physical signals and the digital world. Rising demand for chips goes hand in hand with increasing requirements for performance and complexity per unit.