Hindawi Publishing Corporation EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems Volume 2010, Article ID 261583, 14 pages doi:10.1155/2010/261583 Research Article A Platform-Based Methodology for System-Level Mixed-Signal Design Pierluigi Nuzzo, 1 Xuening Sun, 1 Chang-Ching Wu, 1 Fernando De Bernardinis, 2 and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli 1 1 Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California at Berkeley, 205 Cory Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA 2 Marvell Chip Design Center, Marvell Semiconductors, Viale Repubblica 38, 27100 Pavia, Italy Correspondence should be addressed to Pierluigi Nuzzo, nuzzo@eecs.berkeley.edu Received 5 July 2009; Revised 8 December 2009; Accepted 1 February 2010 Academic Editor: Luca Fanucci Copyright © 2010 Pierluigi Nuzzo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The complexity of today’s embedded electronic systems as well as their demanding performance and reliability requirements are such that their design can no longer be tackled with ad hoc techniques while still meeting tight time to-market constraints. In this paper, we present a system level design approach for electronic circuits, utilizing the platform-based design (PBD) paradigm as the natural framework for mixed-domain design formalization. In PBD, a meet-in-the-middle approach allows systematic exploration of the design space through a series of top-down mapping of system constraints onto component feasibility models in a platform library, which is based on bottom-up characterizations. In this framework, new designs can be assembled from the precharacterized library components, giving the highest priority to design reuse, correct assembly, and efficient design flow from specifications to implementation. We apply concepts from design centering to enforce robustness to modeling errors as well as process, voltage, and temperature variations, which are currently plaguing embedded system design in deep-submicron technologies. The effectiveness of our methodology is finally shown on the design of a pipeline A/D converter and two receiver front-ends for UMTS and UWB communications. 1. Introduction Modern electronic systems are becoming increasingly com- plex and heterogeneous. Telecommunication and multime- dia applications require highly integrated, high-performance systems, where analog, RF, and digital components must be efficiently packaged into a single chip. Emerging sensor and actuator swarm applications, as well, demand customized mixed-domain systems to be embedded into a myriad of extreme physical environments to provide a variety of personal or broad-use services. On the other side, manufac- turing technology is evolving deeper into the nanometer era, where leakage power, increasing process variations, reducing supply voltage, and worsening signal integrity conditions make it daunting even to assess the required performance specifications. To build future integrated systems, designers need to face several challenges, at all levels of abstraction, from system conception to physical implementation. Design complexity is indeed rising while, at the same time, time- to-market constraints are becoming tighter, and dependable systems need to be built out of increasingly unreliable components. Addressing the above challenges requires inno- vative solutions not only in manufacturing technologies and circuit architectures, but also in design methodologies and tools. A disciplined design style that reduces iterations in the flow should be based on a rigorous formalism leveraging accurate and robust performance modeling techniques to guarantee that performance variables of each component are correctly propagated across the design hierarchy. Moreover, fast, global optimization techniques need to be deployed to provide the best design options, for a given application, within a well-constrained and characterized search space. Finally, a practical framework should promote design reuse, and the separation of design concerns to reduce system com- plexity and boost designers’ productivity.