Multistandard SoC's including advanced RF and analog circuitry with digital blocks are pervasive in modern IC's. However, the system design and verification methodologies that capture the complexity of multistandard RF SoC's are still limited. In this paper, an HDL design methodology is introduced for multistandard RF SoC's, which covers all the design layers from system design, to automatic extraction of the models from circuits and a systematic top level verification. The offered HDL based design methodology combines top down and bottom up design approaches, and brings the design and verification closer by reflecting the circuits to models automatically via an Automatic Parameter Extraction (APX) tool. System or block level verification is obtained with models automatically by overnight runs, without the need for extra test benches or designer interaction. This enables short term detection of functional errors or performance losses. A first time tape out of a multimode Bluetooth transceiver SoC is designed and fabricated in 8 months by using the offered methodology. The accuracy of the system level simulations show a very good match with the measurement results after fabrication. The test SoC is fabricated with 0.13 μm CMOS technology.

This paper describes a functional verification methodology for multi-standard wireless Systems-on-Chip (SoC) based on SystemC Virtual Prototyping (VP). The proposed semiautomatic pin-accurate RF VP generation method reduces huge handcrafting work to abstract circuitry into the event-driven simulation domain with satisfactory accuracy, while enabling the flexibility to choose different abstraction levels. A seamless transition between various signal abstractions is enabled by operator overload, e.g. passband and equivalent baseband in order to minimize simulation time according to test cases. This methodology is demonstrated for a low power RF transceiver with the achieved simulation speed of 500μs in 10s computation time.

This paper presents a continuous-time quadrature bandpass ΔΣ ADC that achieves 60dB DR and 67.4dB SFDR at 1MHz BW and 1MHz IF. The modulator uses capacitive feedforward architecture for the 3rdorder loop filter for reduced power consumption and a local feedback loop for optimized noise shaping within the required band. The design is targeted for low power low IF receivers and it achieves a total power consumption of 1.7mW from 1.2V supply. The chip is fabricated with UMC 0.13μm technology.

Since the design and realization of a complex system on a chip is error prone, functional verification should have been a main task in today's design flows but is still underestimated. This paper gives an overview of current modeling approaches to handle functional verification of a design on the top level, prior to tape out. The problems that arise from the different approaches such as baseband modeling and event-driven modeling are explained, and the resulting effects on the simulated system specifications are presented. The necessity of the approaches for future systems, which are not simulatable with current methods, is presented, and the needed extensions of the hardware description languages and simulators are proposed.