PCDS: A new approach for the development of circuit generators in analog IC design

Marolt, Daniel; Greif, Matthias; Scheible, Jürgen; Jerke, Goeran

doi:10.1109/austrochip.2014.6946310

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(16 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thus, there are many on-going studies into improving the techniques for creating complex generators that have brought forth powerful new tools for PCell development such as PCell Designer [12,13] and others [8,11]. Accompanying this intention in the layout domain, complex procedural circuit generators have also emerged on the schematic side for circuit generation [17] and testbench generation, along with sophisticated novel approaches for their development [8,9].…”

Section: Module Generatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Automation of Analog IC Layout

Scheible

Lienig²

2015

Proceedings of the 2015 Symposium on International Symposium on Physical Design

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Physical analog IC design has not been automated to the same degree as digital IC design. This shortfall is primarily rooted in the analog IC design problem itself, which is considerably more complex even for small problem sizes. Significant progress has been made in analog automation in several R&D target areas in recent years. Constraint engineering and generator-based module approaches are among the innovations that have emerged. Our paper will first present a brief review of the state of the art of analog layout automation. We will then introduce active and open research areas and present two visions -a "continuous layout design flow" and a "bottom-up meets top-down design flow" -which could significantly push analog design automation towards its goal of analog synthesis.

show abstract

Section: Module Generatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Advances in analog layout automation have been made however in recent years in many R&D target areas, such as generator-based module approaches [8,9,[11][12][13]16]; and we have witnessed the emergence of constraint engineering to support top-down design styles [2,6,10,18,19,24].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automation of Analog IC Layout

Scheible

Lienig²

2015

Proceedings of the 2015 Symposium on International Symposium on Physical Design

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For this reason, several methods were proposed that would diminish this shortcoming. On the schematic level, PCDS [34] reduces the number of code lines that lead to the intended schematic creation results. For optimization, LAYGEN II improves devicelevel generation [26].…”

Section: Procedural Generatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generating the Generator: A User-Driven and Template-Based Approach towards Analog Layout Automation

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Various analog design automation attempts have addressed the shortcomings of the still largely manual and, thus, inefficient and risky analog design approach. These methods can roughly be divided into synthesis and procedural generation. An important key aspect has, however, rarely been considered: usability. While synthesis requires sophisticated constraints, procedural generators require expert programmers. Both prevent users from adopting the respective method. Thus, we propose a new approach to automatically create procedural generators in a user-driven way. First, analog generators, which also create symbols and layouts, are utilized during schematic entry to encapsulate common analog building blocks. Second, automatic code creation builds a hierarchical generator for all views with the schematic as input. Third, the approach links the building block generators with the layout through an object-oriented template library that is accessible through generator parameters, allowing the user to control the arrangement. No programming is required to reach this state. We believe that our approach will significantly ease the transition of analog designers to procedural generation. At the same time, the templates allow for a “bridge” to open frameworks and synthesis approaches so that the methodologies can be both better spread and combined. This way, comprehensive frameworks of both synthesis-based and procedural-based analog automation methods can be built in a user-driven way, and designers are enabled to gain early layout insight and ease IP reusability.

show abstract