1.1 Analogue IC Design

Analogue Integrated Circuit Design is becoming increasingly important with growing opportunities. The emergence of IC's incorporating mixed analogue and digital functions on a single chip has led to an advanced level of analogue design.

Analogue IC design has traditionally been hampered by process technology, generally because technology has been optimized for digital circuits. This has resulted in an apparent " design time Syndrome", where a single IC may contain only 20% analogue functions which take 80% of the design time. However this situation is now changing as we are experiencing the development of a new generation of " technology specific" analogue design techniques. Furthermore as new and more mature device technologies such as true complementary silicon bipolar junction (BJT), mixed Silicon bipolar and complimentary metal oxide semiconductor devices (BiCMOS) and Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) are becoming available they bring with them the requirement for novel analogue design, methods, techniques and CAD tools necessary for the successful development and exploitation of these technologies for the future market place. Coupled with these technological improvements are the ever shrinking feature size of devices on IC's and the consequential reduction of power supply voltages which has fuelled the creation of "alternative" analogue design techniques.

State-of-the-art analogue integrated circuit design is receiving a tremendous boost from the development and application of current-mode processing, which is rapidly superceeding traditional approaches based on voltage-mode designs. There are many advantages to be gained from a wider view of...