MAGICAL: Toward Fully Automated Analog IC Layout Leveraging Human and Machine Intelligence: Invited Paper

Despite tremendous advancement of digital IC design automation tools over the last few decades, analog IC layout is still heavily manual which is very tedious and error-prone. This paper will first review the history, challenges, and current status of analog IC layout automation. Then, we will prese...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors Xu, Biying, Zhu, Keren, Liu, Mingjie, Lin, Yibo, Li, Shaolan, Tang, Xiyuan, Sun, Nan, Pan, David Z.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.11.2019
Subjects
Integrated circuits
Layout
Performance evaluation
Pins
Routing
Transistors
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Summary:Despite tremendous advancement of digital IC design automation tools over the last few decades, analog IC layout is still heavily manual which is very tedious and error-prone. This paper will first review the history, challenges, and current status of analog IC layout automation. Then, we will present MAGICAL, a human-intelligence inspired, fully-automated analog IC layout system currently being developed under the DARPA IDEA program. It starts from an unannotated netlist, performs automatic layout constraint extraction and device generation, then performs placement and post-placement optimization, followed by routing to obtain the final GDSII layout. Various analytical, heuristic, and machine learning algorithms will be discussed. MAGICAL has obtained promising preliminary results. We will conclude the paper with further discussions on challenges and future directions for fully-automated analog IC layout.
ISSN:1558-2434
DOI:10.1109/ICCAD45719.2019.8942060