Learning from Experience: Applying ML to Analog Circuit Design

The problem of analog design automation has vexed several generations of researchers in electronic design automation. At its core, the difficulty of the problem is related to the fact that machinegenerated designs have been unable to match the quality of the human designer. The human designer typically recognizes blocks from a netlist and draws upon her/his experience to translate these blocks into a circuit that is laid out in silicon. The ability to annotate blocks in a schematic or netlist-level description of a circuit is key to this entire process, but it is a process fraught with complexity due to the large number of variants of each circuit type. For example, the number of topologies of operational transconductance amplifiers (OTAs) easily numbers in the hundreds. A designer manages this complexity by dividing this large set of variants into classes (e.g., OTAs may be telescopic, folded cascode, etc.). Even so, the number of minor variations within each class is large. Early approaches to analog design automation attempted to use rule-based methods to capture these variations, but this database of rules required tender care: each new variant might require a new rule. As machine learning (ML) based alternatives have become more viable, alternative forms of solving this problem have begun to be explored.

Our effort is part of the ALIGN (Analog Layout, Intelligently Generated from Netlists) project [2, 3], which is developing opensource software for analog/mixed-signal circuit layout [1]. Our specific goal is to translate a netlist into a physical layout, with 24-hour turnaround and no human in the loop. The ALIGN flow inputs a netlist whose topology and transistor sizes have already been chosen, a set of performance specifications, and a process design kit (PDK) that defines the process technology. The output of ALIGN is a layout in GDSII format.