Design Flow of a Digital IC: The role of digital IC\/SOC design in CE products

The Central Module of Consumer Electronics (CE) products is a miniature-sized IC that finds wide-spectrum applicability from kitchen appliances to automobiles, aircraft, or any embedded systems. The system in these modern CE products is built as an analog/mixed-signal SOC (AMS-SOC). In a typical case, the digital circuits are the main computational modules, whereas the analog or mixed-signal components are interfacing circuits. Proficient design of digital ICs has become more important because it is one of the significant driving factors of efficient system design in this current mobile electronics era. The various factors involved during IC design, such as speed, power, and reliability, are shown in Figure 1.