Promiced (IPA: /ˈpɹɑ.mɪst/)
single transistor optimization software

 
 

About promiced

ChipDesignWorks' promiced is a single transistor optimizer targeting analog and RF circuit designers, mainly for CMOS technologies. Promiced is meant to be used as fast desktop calculator that lets designed quickly estimate optimum bias settings and optimum device sizes, per device. This results in extreme fast designing and dimensioning (or porting) circuits, or in extremely quickly identify bottlenecks in your design. promiced lets you

• calculate operating point information for specific bias settings, device sizes, temperature, ...
• calculate dimensions or bias conditions given a set of target performance metrics
• perform constrained or unconstrained sweeps to allows you to optimize dimensions and bias conditions for optimum performance
• calculate AC properties and RF properties and properties such as OIP, IIP, harmonic content, ...

Promiced supports many transistor models, including many MOS11, PSP and BSIM models and compound models (consisting of at least one transistor, diodes, passives, ...). promiced is developed for use in industry, and as such currently used within a number of major electronics companies and design houses worldwide. Promiced software runs on Linux machines, either fully stand-alone or in tandem with some IC design suites.

Promiced allows fast optimization of circuits, speeds up the design phase for circuit and can (especially in later design stages) be operated in tandem with conventional circuit simulators. Our goal is to significantly speed up the design process, and provide insight to the circuit designer. This speed aspect is also reflected in the fact that promiced does not have "calculate" or "run" button: everything is calculated (almost) directly after changing a setting, sweep mode, operating condition....

Promiced requires and further improves designers'knowledge on target functioning and target performance of a transistor in a circuit schematic. This may be its function as current source, with voltage headroom limitations and requirements on noise, output impedance and current. Using these constraints, promiced enables a designer to quickly optimize this transistor. This process can be repeated for other transistors that may have completely different conditions, limitations and requirements. Doing so, the designer will get more in depth knowledge on the (feasible) circuit performance AND the design process is significantly sped up.

The design speed improvement using promiced is twofold. Firstly, individually optimizing transistors in a circuit consisting of $N$ (unique) transistors, where each transistor has $M$ parameters to optimize, yields an $M^N$-dimensional optimization problem. Already for relatively small circuit schematic this yields very high dimensional optimization challenges that consume a significant amount of time and computational power. Using promiced, the $N$ (unique) transistors are optimized one-by-one. This way the designer optimizes $N$ times a low-dimensional problem which is much easier, much faster and typically yields a better result. Using promiced yields better designs in less time.
   Added to this, promiced is an extremely fast optimization/analysis tool for single transistors thereby also significantly speeding up the optimization of single transistors. This can be leveraged both in the initial stages of the design to quickly arrive at a good design, or during further optimization or in pinpointing performance bottle necks in later stages of the design process.

Promiced is (by default) operated from a GUI that lets you select the process, transistor type, corner and temperature (in the lower right hand side corner). The bias settings and device dimensions can be specified in the upper right hand side corner. Extra instance settings such as stress parameters can be set in another input panel. Promiced can be integrated in some IC design suites, after which you can easily copy component parameters and bias settings (from various runs) to and from promiced.

promiced's main window
The default output is shown on the left hand side of the GUI. This output includes OP data, noise data, mismatch data and includes a pane that shows some parameters in (constrained or unconstrained) sweeps. This offers many options to designers to pick optimum settings for the transistor.

Promiced comes with addins that show more in-depth or more advanced sweeps and thereby lets designers to optimize also for those properties. This includes properties such as distortion, IIP, OIP, s-parameters and more. Also an addin that allows to set other transistor configurations is provided; an overview of the provided modes in that addin is shown below. Note that this overview is actually from the (context sensitive) help functionality of promiced.

various transistor configurations in promiced
For dimensioning and optimization of RF circuits, the RF small signal addin is provided. This addin lets you quickly and easily optimize (linear) properties of single transistors at RF. The optimizations can be the regular unconstrained optimizations or can be constrained. In the figure below, for the PMOS transistor in the right hand side top corner (with its process, type, bias settings set in promiced's main window) with passives set in the lower right hand side, the small signal properties and the result from a constrained sweep are shown on the left hand side. For this specific sweep, the resulting $|Z_{in}|$ and $|S_{21}|$ are plotted.
promiced's RFsmall signal addin

 

News & updates

On average every year we deploy an update of promiced, with bug fixes, added features, added transistor models, or with performance enhancements. For the 4.n releases a summary with the most relevant changes is shown below. A full update log is provided with each software distribution package.