Analog Layout Synthesis

Integrated circuits are fundamental electronic components in biomedical, automotive and many other technical systems. A small, yet crucial part of a chip consists of analog circuitry. This part is still in large part designed by hand and therefore represents not only a bottleneck in the design flow, but also a permanent source of design errors responsible for re-designs, costly in terms of wasted test chips and in terms of lost time-to-market. Layout design is the step of the analog design flow with the least support by commercially available, computer-aided design tools. This book provides a survey of promising new approaches to automated, analog layout design, which have been described recently and are rapidly being adopted in industry.

Many interesting design trends are shown by the six papers on operational amplifiers (Op Amps). Firstly. there is the line of stand-alone Op Amps using a bipolar IC technology which combines high-frequency and high voltage. This line is represented in papers by Bill Gross and Derek Bowers. Bill Gross shows an improved high-frequency compensation technique of a high quality three stage Op Amp. Derek Bowers improves the gain and frequency behaviour of the stages of a two-stage Op Amp. Both papers also present trends in current-mode feedback Op Amps. Low-voltage bipolar Op Amp design is presented by leroen Fonderie. He shows how multipath nested Miller compensation can be applied to turn rail-to-rail input and output stages into high quality low-voltage Op Amps. Two papers on CMOS Op Amps by Michael Steyaert and Klaas Bult show how high speed and high gain VLSI building blocks can be realised. Without departing from a single-stage OT A structure with a folded cascode output, a thorough high frequency design technique and a gain-boosting technique contributed to the high-speed and the high-gain achieved with these Op Amps. . Finally. Rinaldo Castello shows us how to provide output power with CMOS buffer amplifiers. The combination of class A and AB stages in a multipath nested Miller structure provides the required linearity and bandwidth.

This text addresses the design methodologies and CAD tools available for the systematic design and design automation of analogue integrated circuits. Two complementary approaches discussed increase analogue design productivity, demonstrated throughout using design times of the different design experiments undertaken.

This book presents an innovative methodology for the automatic generation of analog integrated circuits (ICs) layout, based on template descriptions and on evolutionary computational techniques. A design automation tool, LAYGEN II was implemented to validate the proposed approach giving special emphasis to reusability of expert design knowledge and to efficiency on retargeting operations.

Various approaches for finding optimal values for the parameters of analog cells have made their entrance in commercial applications. However, a larger impact on the performance is expected if tools are developed which operate on a higher abstraction level and consider multiple architectural choices to realize a particular functionality. This book examines the opportunities, conditions, problems, solutions and systematic methodologies for this new generation of analog CAD tools.

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.