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Analog chips/circuits are designed by schematic capture, the designer draws the schema of a circuit that fulfills spec. The schema contains electronic component like transistors, capacitors, etc. This is most of the time done in a graphical way; part of this can be scripted. For the latter often then an EDA vendor specific scripting language like (Cadence) skill.
After schematic capture is done the circuit is layouted; often by an engineer different from the designer. This is also a graphical thing with recently help from tools/scripting to auto-generate part of the layout from the schema. Due to the importance of (interconnect) parasitics on analog behavior in current nodes a close collaboration between designer and layouter is needed or some iterations of design->layout->design->...
Problem with analog is that specifications on performance are so diverse that no abstraction like the 0/1/Z/X levels for digital are possible and no thing like HDL is currently found for analog.
For mixed-signal ASICs often analog IP blocks are used where analog behavior is abstracted away behind a (digital) interface which makes it possible to use it in a digital flow.
Thanks a lot for your detailed description which helped me in understanding it in a very easier way!
And I have got one more question: Coming to the ASIC, is it specifically for digital chips or what? If ASIC is specific to do only one kind of functions like codec or Bitcoin mining, then what are other chips called that designed to do some general purpose things. Also tell me what a single chip can do some general purpose things, with example.
And I have got one more question: Coming to the ASIC, is it specifically for digital chips or what? If ASIC is specific to do only one kind of functions like codec or Bitcoin mining, then what are other chips called that designed to do some general purpose things. Also tell me what a single chip can do some general purpose things, with example.
What ASIC means, depends on who you ask. The me it means anything that has been custom designed for a specific requirement of a customer and not meant to be sold as a discrete chip for broader use. It can thus be anything from full custom analog, mixed-signal, SoCs, digital only. Anything you find in a chip for example on digikey can be made as ASIC.
Hi Staf_Verhaegen,
And I have got one more question: Coming to the ASIC, is it specifically for digital chips or what? If ASIC is specific to do only one kind of functions like codec or Bitcoin mining, then what are other chips called that designed to do some general purpose things. Also tell me what a single chip can do some general purpose things, with example.
I would say you can go by the job descriptions. When I see a posting asking for an ASIC Engineer, the skill set tends to be all HDLs, P&R flows, algorithms, etc., so definitely a digital skill set.
As for what is not and ASIC, the most obvious answer is a general purpose processor, like your Intel Core devices.
