Hello everybody, My name is Emilio Baungarten, I am currently working with multiple digital projects with the SKY130 PDK and Caravel, however, the 130nm technology and the layout area limit me in creating more complex digital systems. That's why I would like to start with mixed signal projects. My knowledge related to analog system design and tools are scarce, could someone tell me the tools and flow to create an analog circuit and integrate it with Caravel. What I understand is that the design starts with xschem and its simulation, but then what happens next, how do I convert the schematic to layout, once the layout is created how do I position it in caravel? If someone could explain it to me it would be very useful and a good reference point to start in this area of mixed signal systems.

You make your own designs in transistor level, in xschem, them you make you custom layout using magic. It relatively hard to make layouts, but soon, will have a good library of basic building blocks for sky130, such as amplifiers, sensors, current and voltage references, analog digital converters, etc. You will need only to use those building blocks to make your systems.

bminch has a bunch of tutorials on youtube on how to use xschem and magic, those may be a nice starting point

Emilio, We're working on getting more memory density in SKY130 by brining out some real SRAMs and that should help you. In addition OpenLane2 should significant increase what we can get done in the chip area. The IO bandwidth and IO count will also increase for our next caravel iteration,

Is there any prebuilt analog blocks such as adc and current to voltage converters are available?