State-of-the-Art on Analog Layout Automation

Abstract

In the past few years, several tools for the automation of analog integrated circuit layout (IC) design with application on both new and reused designs have emerged. This Chapter starts by addressing the placement problem in electronic design automation (EDA), providing a brief overview of the different available floorplan representations and most recent challenges presented to placement tools. In section “Routing”, an overview of existent routing algorithms is presented, with emphasis on electromigration-aware approaches and wiring symmetry considerations. In section “Complete Layout Generation Tools”, the main references of complete automatic layout generators are presented, and, in section “Closing the Gap between Electrical and Physical Design”, the analog circuit-sizing task is overviewed to present the most recent advances in automatic layout-aware circuit-sizing approaches. Finally, in section “Overview of the State-of-the-Art on Analog Layout Automation”, a global analysis of the recent literature is made as introduction for the implementation choices taken for the methodologies proposed in the automatic analog IC layout generation tool described in this book. This complete state-of-the-art on analog layout automation, reveals that after many years of stagnation, EDA ecosystem is evolving, creating more robust, efficient and complementary approaches to the existing tools.