Analog and mixed-signal (AMS) circuit layout design is one of few fields in IC design that still significantly behind in terms of automation. The reason behind this is from both the algorithm and software. AMS circuits are sensitive to layout implementation so the industry often relies on human design experience to optimize the layouts. Lacking accessible and easy to use software also raises the barrier to adopt automation tools. The seminar will present some recent results of the AMS layout automation framework MAGICAL, which leverages both machine and human intelligence to produce fully automated analog layouts from netlists to GDSII, including automatic layout constraint generation, placement, and routing. MAGICAL 1.0 has been open-sourced and validated with a silicon-proven 40nm 1GS/s ∆Σ ADC.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Keren Zhu is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his Ph.D. in the same department at UT. He received his Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include physical design automation, analog integrated circuit design automation, machine learning for EDA, and computing system with emerging technologies. He has published dozens of technical papers at premier EDA, circuit, and machine learning venues and multiple book chapters. He has been nominated for the best paper award at several conferences.

References

1. Keren Zhu, Hao Chen, Mingjie Liu and David Z. Pan, “Tutorial and Perspectives on MAGICAL: A Silicon-Proven Open-Source Analog IC Layout System,” in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II, 2022.

2. Hao Chen∗, Mingjie Liu∗, Xiyuan Tang∗, Keren Zhu∗, Abhishek Mukherjee, Nan Sun and David Z. Pan, “MAGICAL 1.0: An Open-Source Fully-Automated AMS Layout Synthesis Framework Verified With a 40-nm 1 GS/s ∆Σ ADC,” in IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), 2021. (∗ indicates equal contributions in alphabetic order)

3. Biying Xu, Keren Zhu, Mingjie Liu, Yibo Lin, Shaolan Li, Xiyuan Tang, Nan Sun and David Z. Pan, “MAGICAL: Toward Fully Automated Analog IC Layout Leveraging Human and Machine Intelligence,” in IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), 2019