On the Simulation Performance of Contemporary AMS Hardware Description Languages

Mixed-Signal extensions to VHDL, Verilog, and SystemC languages have been developed in order to provide a unifying environment for the modeling and verification of Analog and Mixed Signal (AMS) designs at different levels of abstraction. In this paper, we model the behavior of a set of benchmark designs in VHDL-AMS, Verilog-AMS and SystemC-AMS and compare the simulation performance with HSPICE. The various experimental results observed for the benchmark circuits show the superiority of VHDL-AMS and Verilog-AMS against SystemC-AMS and HSPICE in terms of simulation run-times at lower level of abstraction.