PAGE: Parallel Agile Genetic Exploration towards Utmost Performance for Analog Circuit Design

Abstract

This paper presents an agile hierarchical synthesis framework for analog circuit. To acknowledge the limitation for a given topology analog circuit, this hierarchical synthesis work proposes a performance exploration technique and a non-uniform-step simulation process. Apart from spec targeted designs, this proposed approach can help to search the solutions better than designers' expectation. A parallel genetic algorithm (PAGE) method is employed for performance exploration. Unlike other evolution-based topology explorations, this is the first method that regards performance constraints as input genome for evolution and resolves the multiple-objective problem with the multiple-population feature. Populations of selected performance are transfered to device variables by re-targeting technique. Based on a normalization of device variable distribution, a probabilistic stochastic simulation significantly reduces the convergence time to find the global optima of circuit performance. Experimental results show that our approach on radio-frequency distributed amplifier (RFDA) and folded cascode operational amplifier (Op-Amp) in different technologies can obtain better runtime and higher quality in analog synthesis.