Closing the Gap Between Electrical and Physical Design: The Layout-Aware Solution

Iterations between separate phases in any procedural design process, usually a by-product of unexpected (or, simply, very complex to consider) adverse effects, clearly play against any time-to-market requirements. In analog integrated circuit (IC) design, going back and forth between electrical and physical synthe- sis to counterbalance layout-induced performance degradations needs to be thus avoided as much as possible. One possible solution involves the integration of the 1 traditionally separated electrical and physical synthesis phases, by including layout- induced effects, in the form of layout parasitics, right into the electrical synthesis phase, in what has been called parasitic-aware synthesis. This solution, as such, is not yet complete since there are geometric requirements (minimization of the occu- pied area or fulfillment of certain layout aspect ratio, among others), whose effects on the resulting parasitics are not usually considered during electrical synthesis. In this chapter, a layout-aware solution that tackles both geometric and parasitic-aware electrical synthesis is proposed. This technique uses a combination of simulation- based optimization, procedural layout generation, exhaustive geometric evaluation algorithms, and several mechanisms for parasitic estimation. Thanks to the nature of this combination, the solution benefits from, and also fosters, reuse of analog intellectual property (IP) blocks. Several detailed design examples are provided.