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Mosaic design: Personas
Alice is a student in IC design at the University of Twente. She has to use Cadence for her university projects, which she finds frustrating to use, but hopes is good for her employability. She wishes there were more easy to use IC design tools, but she does not like writing software.
(I have not yet talked to such a person) Bob is an electrical engineer who studied ??? and now works on ???. He has a good understanding of electronics, but is not familiar with IC design. His company is trying to gain a competitive advantage by designing an ASIC to replace off-the-shelf parts in some of their products. But because they do not employ IC designers, buying commercial IC design tools and designing a chip is infeasible.
Software people mainly want to use analog blocks in their digital designs rather than do analog designs. They are probably better served with analog generators or using components designed by someone else.
Experienced Cadence users can be very conservative, and basically want a copy of Cadence but cheaper and better.
Caroline is a software developer who works on embedded systems. She is experienced in writing Verilog for FPGAs, and through the Google Skywatter shuttle, is experimenting with compiling some of her designs into ASICs. She has a rudimentary understanding of electronics, but would like to add some analog peripherals to her ASIC, such as an ADC. She hopes analog generators and place-and-route algorithms can take care of the analog bits for her as much as possible. Due to her software background, she wants to us unit tests and automate as much as possible.
Dan is an experienced IC designer who uses commercial IC design tools in his day job. He is very used to these tools, and knows all the tricks, keyboard shortcuts, and workarounds, and expects other tools to work in the same way. He found the Google Skywater PDK, which he is using to tape out a hobby project he's designing, but he is missing a lot of functionality in the open source tools. He finds that xschem and klayout are serviceable at drawing circuits and layouts, but has accumulated a collection of scripts to do simulations.