State of the art on analog layout automation

Abstract

In the past few years, several tools for the automation of the analog integrated circuit (IC) cell and system layout design, with application on both new and reused designs have emerged. Yet, most of the layout design is still handmade, essentially because analog designers want to have total control over the different design options, and also, due to the fact that current fully automated generators of analog IC layouts produce solutions which are not yet competitive with the manually crafted ones. The state-of-the-art on analog layout automation that follows reveals that after many years of stagnation, electronic design automation (EDA) market is evolving, creating more efficient and complementary approaches to the existing tools. The chapter starts by addressing the placement problem in EDA, providing a brief overview of the most recent placement tools developed, followed by the presentation of the main references of automatic layout generation tools, and the recent advances in layout-aware analog synthesis approaches. Finally, the available commercial solutions for analog layout automation are outlined.