Analog Circuit Synthesis with Constraint Generation of Layout-Dependent Effects by Geometric Programming

Yu ZHANG
Gong CHEN
Bo YANG
Jing LI
Qing DONG
Ming-Yu LI
Shigetoshi NAKATAKE

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E96-A    No.12    pp.2487-2498
Publication Date: 2013/12/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1587/transfun.E96.A.2487
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on VLSI Design and CAD Algorithms)
Category: Physical Level Design
Keyword: 
circuit synthesis,  STI,  WPE,  channel length modulation,  geometric programming,  

Full Text: PDF>>
Buy this Article


Summary: 
As CMOS devices scaling down in nowadays integrated circuits, the impact of layout-dependent effects (LDEs) to circuit performances becomes to be significant. This paper mainly focuses on LDE-aware analog circuit synthesis. Our circuit synthesis follows an optimization framework of transistor sizing based on geometric programming (GP) in which analog circuit performances are formulated in terms of monomials and posynomials. Providing GP models for the LDEs such as the shallow trench isolation (STI) stress and the well proximity effect (WPE), we can generate layout constraints related to LDEs during the circuit synthesis. Applying our circuit synthesis to a typical two-stage op-amp, we showed that the resultant circuit, which generated by GP with circuit performance and layout constraints, satisfied all the specifications with the verification of HSPICE simulation based on the BSIM model with LDE options.