Previous Works on Automated Analog IC Sizing

Abstract

In the past few years, several tools for the automation of analog integrated circuit (IC) sizing have been proposed by both academy and industry, however, much of the analog circuit sizing is still handmade. Essentially because analog designers want to have total control over the design options, and also, due to the fact that automated tools sometimes produce designs that neither fully meet designers’ expectations nor are competitive with the manually crafted ones. The variety of tools and techniques, covering several aspects of analog circuit sizing automation, surveyed in the following sections show that the landscape of electronic design automation (EDA) for analog ICs is evolving, pressed by the complexity deriving from the new fabrication processes. More efficient and complementary approaches to the existing analog IC design automation tools remain a focus of research for the analog design automation community. This chapter starts with a brief introduction to analog circuit sizing automation, giving an historical perspective on the early methods proposed to tackle automatic analog circuit sizing. In Sect. 2.2, an overview of the existing automation approaches to analog IC sizing is presented, with emphasis on the methodologies to size and optimize the circuit, and on the methodologies to estimate circuit’s performance. In Sect. 2.3, the main references to robust circuit design and optimization are discussed, and, Sect. 2.4 presents the most recent advances in layout-aware analog sizing approaches. Finally, Sect. 2.5, summarizes the current state-of-the-art in automatic analog IC sizing and frames the contributions of this work.