Company Description

Founded in 2001, Lynguent ® , Inc., a privately-held company headquartered in Portland, Ore., supplies integrated analog and mixed-signal (AMS) design development products to the global semiconductor and electronics industries. Customers use Lynguent’s productivity tools and services to create, maintain, reuse, debug, and validate AMS models and related technology to accelerate time-to-market for a wide range of state-of-the-art integrated circuits (ICs) and electronic systems. Lynguent has research and development centers in Fayetteville, Ark., and Prague, Czech Republic. The company is staffed by electronics industry veterans including founders Dr. Martin Vlach, CEO and a founder of industry pioneer Analogy, Inc., and Dr. Alan Mantooth, chief scientist, who is also the University of Arkansas 21 st Century Chair in Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuit Design and Computer-Aided Design. The Lynguent team has outstanding expertise that enables it to deliver technology to minimize the bottlenecks in today’s AMS development processes.

Market Served

Submicron IC designs, whether digital, analog, or mixed-signal, are affected by certain factors that can degrade product performance and yield. Because of an increasing focus of the electronics industry on AMS functionality, engineers need to create models of these functions at various levels of abstraction to accelerate the simulation and validation processes. Today, AMS models are developed with hardware description language (HDL)-based tools that come with proprietary electronic design automation (EDA) platforms. This limits productivity and impedes the reuse of models in other designs using different HDLs.

Lynguent is focused on delivering products that will provide superior alternatives to breaking the AMS bottleneck and enable semiconductor and electronic systems companies to save time-to-market and improve their bottom-line through dramatically improved engineering productivity. Lynguent’s technology applies as well to the development of complex electronics-based systems beyond the IC components themselves. The broader market reach for Lynguent’s tools includes, but is not limited to analysis and design of :

• complex electronics systems used in communications, automotive, aerospace, and rail;
• power management of systems used in smart phones, portable media players, navigation systems and other electronics;
• sensors used to measure real world parameters such as temperature, pressure, and noise for use in medical, agricultural, automotive, aerospace, and consumer electronics; and
• invasive and non-invasive imaging systems, biological monitoring systems, and equipment and bio-medical devices medical industries.

Conclusion

With Lynguent’s new ModLyng environment, engineers can create, maintain, debug, and translate their existing AMS models faster than ever before. And, they can reuse the models in other designs, across a number of target HDLs. ModLyng does this through an easy-to-use graphical user interface that is independent of, yet compatible with, proprietary simulation environments and HDLs. Engineers can augment and extend their models with new equations or icons representing pre-configured behaviors. Alternatively, engineers can create new models with ModLyng, without having to worry about the syntactic details of a HDL which is especially important in developing behavioral model blocks for speeding design simulation and validation. The models may be exported to the same language in which it was written or automatically translated to another language. (Some restrictions apply.)

ModLyng also features unique analysis and debugging capabilities. Using the tools in the ModLyng environment, ports, parameters, equations, statements, and topologies of a model are all easily manipulated and checked.

The ModLyng environment can be used regardless of whether the AMS technology is part of an IC’s external functionality (e.g., systems-on-chip (SoCs), analog-digital converters, or amplifiers) or if the AMS technology is embedded in the IC’s underlying technology (e.g., the semiconductor models used in modern IC design processes).