APOSTLE: Asynchronously Parallel Optimization for Sizing Analog Transistors Using DNN Learning

Abstract

Analog circuit sizing is a high-cost process in terms of the manual effort invested and the computation time spent. With rapidly developing technology and high market demand, bringing automated solutions for sizing has attracted great attention. This paper presents APOSTLE, an asynchronously parallel optimization method for sizing analog transistors using Deep Neural Network (DNN) learning. This work introduces several methods to minimize real-time of optimization when the sizing task consists of several different simulations with varying time costs. The key contributions of this paper are: (1) a batch optimization framework, (2) a novel deep neural network architecture for exploring design points when the existed solutions are not always fully evaluated, (3) a ranking approximation method based on cheap evaluations and (4) a theoretical approach to balance between the cheap and the expensive simulations to maximize the optimization efficiency. Our method shows high real-time efficiency compared to other black-box optimization methods both on small building blocks and on large industrial circuits while reaching similar or better performance.