About ProMOST
ChipDesignWorks' ProMOST is a single transistor optimizer targeting analog and RF circuit designers, mainly for CMOS technologies. ProMOST 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. ProMOST 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, ...
ProMOST supports many transistor models, including many MOS11, PSP and BSIM models and compound models (consisting of at least one transistor, diodes, passives, ...). ProMOST is developed for use in industry, and as such currently used within a number of major electronics companies and design houses worldwide. ProMOST software runs on Linux machines, either stand-alone or integrated in some IC design suites.
ProMOST 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 ProMOST does not have "calculate" or "run" button: everything is calculated (almost) directly after changing a setting, sweep mode, operating condition....
ProMOST 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, ProMOST 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 faster.
The design speed improvement using ProMOST is fourfold.
Firstly,
breaking down a circuit in smaller parts significantly speeds op designing
and dimensioning/optimizing transistors. This is fundamental: optimizing
or dimensioning a circuit consisting of N (unique) transistors,
where each transistor has M parameters to optimize, yields an
MN-dimensional non-linear 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 ProMOST, the N (unique) transistors are optimized one-by-one.
This way the designer optimizes N times a low-dimensional non-linear
problem which is much easier, much faster.
Part of the interaction between transistors is however lost when
optimizing at transistor level, which requires running full circuit
level simulations for further and final optimization.
Secondly, using ProMOST for a first phase of dimensioning/optimization
the initial design in the circuit simulator will be close to optimum.
For non-linear optimization problems, a starting point that is relatively
close to the (overall) optimum is known to result in fast convergence
to that overall optimum.
Thirdly, ProMOST runs the actual model in a number of background solvers
(ac, op, dc, noise, ...) and hence gives results that match those of
your circuit simulator. Added to this, ProMOST is an extremely fast
optimization/analysis tool with typical response times well below 1 second.
Fourthly, working your way through optimizing/dimensioning single
transistors in your circuit design can efficiently pinpoint bottle
necks for performance in your circuit design: e.g. failing to extract
a target (transistor) performance for its current budget and voltage
headroom indicates a serious roadblock already in the early stages of
circuit design.
ProMOST 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. After starting
ProMOST from within an IC design suite, component parameters and bias settings (from
various runs) can be copied between ProMOST and the schematic entry window
of the design suite.
ProMOST 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.
News & updates
On average every year we deploy an update of ProMOST, with bug fixes, added features, added transistor models, or with performance enhancements. A full update log is provided with each software distribution package.