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This paper presents an improvement in usability and integrity of simulation-based analog circuit sizing. Instead of using geometrical sizing parameters (width, length), a transformed design-space, consisting exclusively of electrical parameters (branch currents, efficiencies and speed) is utilized. This design-space is explored more efficiently by optimizers. Moreover, this design-space can be reduced without affecting the quality of the result. The method is illustrated on two application examples, a symmetrical and a miller operational amplifier. Sizing the circuits using the transformed design-space showed significant reduction in required circuit simulations (up to 11x faster), better convergence, without loss in quality.
Electronic design automation approaches can roughly be divided into optimizers and procedures. While the former have enabled highly automated synthesis flows for digital integrated circuits, the latter play a vital (but mostly underestimated role) in the analog domain. This paper describes both automation strategies in comparison, identifying two fundamentally different automation paradigms that reflect the two basic design practices known as “top-down” and “bottom-up”. Then, with a focus on the latter, the history of procedural approaches is traced from their
early beginnings until today’s evolvements and future prospects to underline their practical importance and to accentuate their scientific value, both in itself and in the overall context of EDA.
A procedural approach to automate the manual design process in analog integrated circuit design
(2018)
This paper presents a novel approach to automating the design of analog integrated circuits: (1) the Expert Design Plan (EDP), a procedural generator, and (2) the EDP Language, a high-level description language for writing an EDP. An EDP is a parameterizable, executable script, which reproduces a designer’s course of action when designing a circuit. Thus, an EDP formalizes the design expert’s knowledge-based strategy and makes it reusable. Since it is essential that an EDP represents a circuit designers’ way of thinking and working as close as possible, the designers themselves should be enabled to create the EDP. Therefore, our approach provides a input method through a domain-specific language called EDP Language (EDPL). Using this language is intuitive and requires no special training. In an exemplary implementation of our approach, a common-source amplifier is automatically sized using a set of only 10 instructions. Even in the first usage our EDP approach has appeared to be more efficient than the manual sizing process.