Services

Strategic Advice

I provide strategic advice to help structure, re-structure, ramp or re-vitalize your analog design process to better align with delivering your power, performance, area and time-to-market (PPACt) goals. Analog IC designs have long time horizons, often taking at minimum 18 months from design inception to first silicon and sometimes taking much, much longer. With complex designs, long manufacturing timelines and complex bringup and testing, it is crucial to break down design deliverables that are small and of short duration. I can help define the intermediate deliverables that provide guardrails around your projeects PPACt goals.

Your analog design process should be a machine, taking power, performance, area, and time targets and producing designs. This can only be done by delivering design output (usually tapeouts) at regular intervals and periodically reviewing and optimizing bottlenecks and adjusting processes to move fast enough to get silicon feedback in time to be useful.

Technical Advice

Below is a list of technical aspects I can advise on with the above strategic framework in mind.

Design Advice

• Analog architecture and topology selection for communication systems.
• Translation of standards requirements to internal system and block targets.

Design Process and Flow Advice

• Advising on analog design infrastructure and processes (versioning, ticketing, corners, design review gates, etc.)
• Advising on improving efficiency and velocity of design activities
• Advising on correct block-level and robust top-level electomigration and IR drop (EM/IR) flows
• Advising on manageable aging flow and design techniques to help prevent and mitigate aging effects in custom analog/digital circuits in modern process nodes

Design Review Input

• External advisor in design reviews and key architectural and product decisions.

Technical Interviews

• Advising on hiring for key roles, including interviewing.

Technical Due Diligence for Investments, Acquisitions, or Purchases

• Technical due diligence in analog IP investments or acquisitions.

Technical Advice for EDA Tool Design

• Advising on EDA tool design for simulation, aging, electromigration, and parasitic analysis.

Embedding

Advice is usually provided after an exploratory phase. I can also help with implementation and experimentation to help the execution phase of better aligning your analog IC developments with your business goals. If we deem it necessary, I can embed with your design team for a limited period of time (maximum 3 months) in order to better help identify key bottlenecks and jump-start any required changes.