From Battery to Core: System-Level Workflows for Power Management Unit (PMU) Design

Enrico Pardi, Director of Analog Design Team at Apple Italia, will give a lecture on Power Management Unit (PMU) Design to the students of the University of Genova.

The presentation describes how a Power Management Unit (PMU) ASIC is taken from the first idea to a product in the field, and how the different teams involved work together along the way. It illustrates how system requirements are defined and translated into design specifications through negotiation with the technology and package teams, and how these specifications lead to a floorplan. It then explains how analog and digital design proceed in parallel, covering schematics and simulations, RTL, synthesis and place-and-route, and how design for testability, layout and top-level integration fit into the same flow. The discussion continues with the verification of the complete system through mixed-signal simulation and the decision to tape out. It presents how silicon is produced, validated in the lab, tested in production and qualified for reliability, and how failures returning from the field are analysed and fed back into the process. It shows how the work of many teams is broken into tasks and dependencies and organised in a project plan. Finally, few examples of the design, failure analysis or test flows are illustrated as well.