Fully Automated Layout Synthesis For Analog And Mixed Signal Integrated Circuits

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Fully-automated Layout Synthesis for Analog and Mixed-signal Integrated Circuits

The performance of analog circuits is critically dependent on layout parasitics, but the layout has traditionally been a manual and time-consuming task. Analog and mixed-signal (AMS) circuits often impose specific parasitics and mismatch requirements on their layout implementation. Designers leverage their prior experience to place devices in specific patterns and configurations to reduce parasitics, the effects of local variation gradients, and layout-dependent effects. The reason behind this is from both the algorithm and software. Automated AMS layout synthesis faces challenges in developing effective place-and-route (PNR) algorithms for high-performance AMS circuits and lacks easily usable and accessible software. This dissertation covers several analog PNR algorithms to improve the quality of automated layout synthesis and the circuit learning methodology targeting further reducing human efforts. The proposed techniques have become critical parts of the open-source AMS layout synthesis software MAGICAL. This dissertation first proposes a novel analog routing methodology. The proposed framework, GeniusRoute, leverages machine learning to provide routing guidance, mimicking the sophisticated manual layout approaches. This approach allows the automatic analog router to follow the design expertise of human engineers while no additional manual effort is required to code the layout strategies. The proposed methodology obtains significant improvements over existing techniques and achieves competitive performance to manual layouts while capable of generalizing to circuits of different functionality. This dissertation also proposes a practical mixed-signal placement framework. Unlike the existing techniques, which mainly focus on geometric constraints in analog building blocks, the proposed framework formulates and effectively optimizes the system-level signal flow for sensitive mixed-signal circuits. Leveraging prior knowledge from schematics, we propose considering the critical signal paths in automatic AMS placement and presenting an efficient framework. The proposed framework shows efficiency and effectiveness with a reduced routed wirelength compared to a state-of-the-art AMS placer and improved post-layout performance. Furthermore, the well generation in the analog layout synthesis flow is revisited. Instead of treating well generation as an isolated process, we propose a new methodology of well-aware placement. We formulate the well-aware placement problem and propose a machine learning-guided placement framework. By allowing well sharing between transistors and explicitly considering wells in placement, the proposed framework achieves more than 74% improvement in the area and more than 26% reduction in half-perimeter wirelength over existing placement methodologies in experimental results. Finally, this dissertation revisits and explores the fundamental problem of analog circuit learning. A novel unsupervised circuit learning framework is proposed to leverage the human layout as a training label. The machine learning model is pre-trained with automatically extracted labels and then transferred to other downstream tasks. The transferrable circuit representation model demonstrates the possibility of a machine learning model to understand the circuits
Analog Integrated Circuit Design Automation

This book introduces readers to a variety of tools for analog layout design automation. After discussing the placement and routing problem in electronic design automation (EDA), the authors overview a variety of automatic layout generation tools, as well as the most recent advances in analog layout-aware circuit sizing. The discussion includes different methods for automatic placement (a template-based Placer and an optimization-based Placer), a fully-automatic Router and an empirical-based Parasitic Extractor. The concepts and algorithms of all the modules are thoroughly described, enabling readers to reproduce the methodologies, improve the quality of their designs, or use them as starting point for a new tool. All the methods described are applied to practical examples for a 130nm design process, as well as placement and routing benchmark sets.
Computer-Aided Design of Analog Integrated Circuits and Systems

The tools and techniques you need to break the analog design bottleneck! Ten years ago, analog seemed to be a dead-end technology. Today, System-on-Chip (SoC) designs are increasingly mixed-signal designs. With the advent of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) technologies that can integrate both analog and digital functions on a single chip, analog has become more crucial than ever to the design process. Today, designers are moving beyond hand-crafted, one-transistor-at-a-time methods. They are using new circuit and physical synthesis tools to design practical analog circuits; new modeling and analysis tools to allow rapid exploration of system level alternatives; and new simulation tools to provide accurate answers for analog circuit behaviors and interactions that were considered impossible to handle only a few years ago. To give circuit designers and CAD professionals a better understanding of the history and the current state of the art in the field, this volume collects in one place the essential set of analog CAD papers that form the foundation of today's new analog design automation tools. Areas covered are: * Analog synthesis * Symbolic analysis * Analog layout * Analog modeling and analysis * Specialized analog simulation * Circuit centering and yield optimization * Circuit testing Computer-Aided Design of Analog Integrated Circuits and Systems is the cutting-edge reference that will be an invaluable resource for every semiconductor circuit designer and CAD professional who hopes to break the analog design bottleneck.