Layout-dependent effects (LDEs) significantly impact analog circuit performance. Traditionally, designers have relied on symmetric placement of circuit components to mitigate variations caused by LDEs. However, due to non-linear nature of these effects, conventional methods often fall short. We propose an objective-driven, multi-level, multi-agent Q-learning framework to explore unconventional design space of analog layout, opening new avenues for optimizing analog circuit performance. Our approach achieves better variation performance than the state-of-the-art layout techniques. Notably, this is the first application of multiagent RL in analog layout automation. The proposed approach is compared with non-ML approach based on simulated annealing.

Despite significant recent advancements in analog design automation, analog front-end design remains a challenge characterized by its heavy reliance on human designer expertise together with extensive trial-and-error simulations. In this paper, we present a novel data-driven analog circuit synthesizer with automatic topology selection and sizing. We propose a modular approach to build a comprehensive, parameterized circuit topology library. Instead of starting from an exhaustive dataset, which is often not available or too expensive to build, we build an adaptive topology dataset, which can later be enhanced with synthetic data generated using variational autoencoders (VAE), a generative machine learning technique. This integration bolsters our methodology's predictive capabilities, minimizing the risk of inadvertent oversight of viable topologies. To ensure accuracy and robustness, the predicted topology is re-sized for verification and further performance optimization. Our experiments, which involve over 360 OPAMP topologies and over 540K data points demonstrate our framework's capability to identify optimal topology and its sizing within minutes, achieving design quality comparable to that of experienced designers.

Recent advances in analog device sizing algorithms show promising results on the automatic schematic design. However, the majority of the sizing algorithms are based on schematic-level simulations and layout-agnostic. The physical layout implementation brings extra parasitics to the analog circuits, leading to discrepancies between schematic and post-layout performance. This performance gap raises questions about the effectiveness of automatic analog device sizing tools. Prior work has leveraged procedural layout generation to account for layout-induced parasitics in the sizing process. However, the need for layout templates makes such methodology limited in application. In this paper, we propose to bridge automatic analog sizing with post-layout performance using state-of-the-art optimization-based analog layout generators. A quantitative study is conducted to measure the impact of layout awareness in state-of-the-art device sizing algorithms. Furthermore, we present our perspectives on the future directions in layout-aware analog circuit schematic design.