Automatic Synthesis of Operational Amplifiers based on Analytic Circuit Models

An automatic synthesis tool for CMOS op amps (OPASYN) has been developed. The program starts from one of a number of op amp circuits and proceeds to optimize various device sizes and bias currents to meet a given set of design specifications. Because it uses analytic circuit models in its inner optimization loop, it can search efficiently through a large part of the possible solution space. The program has a SPICE interface that automatically performs circuit simulations for the candidate solutions to verify the results of the synthesis and optimization procedure. The simulation results are also used to fine-tune the analytic circuit descriptions in the database. OPASYN has been implemented in Franz Lisp and demonstrated for three different basic circuits with a conventional 3 µm process and a more advanced 1.5 µm process. Experiments have shown that OPASYN quickly produces practical designs which will meet reasonable design objectives.