This article presents a new paradigm for analog placement, which further incorporates poles in addition to the considerations of symmetry island and monotonic current flow while minimizing wire crossings. The nodes along the signal paths in an analog circuit contribute to the poles, and the parasitics on these dominant poles can significantly limit the circuit performance. Although the monotonic placement methods introduced in the previous works can generate simpler routing topologies, the unawareness of poles, especially the dominant and the first non-dominant poles and wire crossings among critical nets, may increase wire load and performance degradation. This article proposes a pole-aware analog layout synthesis methodology to minimize the total wire load and wire crossings while satisfying different symmetry and topological routing constraints. Using a strong-connectivity approach to the group Steiner problem, the presented method for automatic selection of port locations can help reduce total wirelength, increase routing flexibility, and minimize total wire crossings. Experimental results show that the proposed approach results in better solution quality in circuit performance compared with other recent works.

Layout-dependent (LDEs) introduce an inevitable performance degradation in analog and mixed-signal circuit design with advanced process technologies below 90 nm. The main LDE sources, including the well proximity effect (WPE), length of diffusion (LOD), and the oxide-to-oxide spacing effect (OSE), cause substantial fluctuations in carrier mobility and threshold voltage of transistors. In traditional design flows, impact of these in post-layout simulation, leading to expensive re-design iterations by inspecting the physical locations of devices with respect to one another. In this article, we introduce the concept of an ideal mobility multiplier based on physics models, in order to minimize the LDE effects with a fast simulated annealing algorithm through various LDE alleviating operations. Based on the introduced mobility multiplier and the hierarchical B*-tree (HB*-tree) topological representation, our LDE-aware analog placement methodology can simultaneously optimize not only the area and wire length, but also the LDEs, while maintaining linear-packing time complexity of HB*-trees. Compared to the most recent works on 65 nm-based analog circuits, experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively and efficiently reduce LDE variations, while improving the circuit performance.

Ring Oscillator Physical Unclonable Functions (RO-PUFs) exploit the inherent manufacturing process variations, such as systematic and stochastic variations, to generate secret PUF responses that are unique to the device. Stochastic variations are random, while systematic variation exhibits a strong spatial correlation. Therefore, systematic process variation reduces the randomness of the PUF response. This lowers the ability of a PUF response to uniquely identify and authenticate individual devices. Further, the impact of systematic variation is paramount when the two ROs in comparison are placed far apart. Comparing the ROs that are close to each other does improve the randomness, but the responses generated are unreliable and limiting the possible Challenge-Response Pairs (CRPs). In this article, we are proposing a method to reduce the impact of systematic process variation on the RO oscillation frequencies by using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Principal Components (PCs) model the directions of systematic and stochastic variation present on a device. By projecting the oscillation frequencies in the direction of stochastic variation, the impact of systematic variation can be reduced. Our proposed method neither restricts the placement of ROs to close groups nor limits the possible CRPs. The method is evaluated on a large population of 218 Xilinx Artix-7 FPGAs. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method, we purposely paired the ROs that are placed far apart on the FPGA fabric. Results obtained prove the ability of the proposed method in removing the impact of systematic variation on the oscillation frequencies and thereby producing truly random responses.

This paper presents a new paradigm for analog placement, which further incorporates poles in addition to the considerations of symmetry-island and monotonic current flow while minimizing wire crossings. The nodes along the signal path in an analog circuit contribute to the poles, and the parasitics on these dominant poles can significantly limit the circuit performance. Although the monotonic placements introduced in the previous works can generate simpler routing topologies, the unawareness of poles, especially both dominant pole and the first non-dominant pole, and wire crossing among critical nets may result in the increase wire-load and performance degradation. Experimental results show that the proposed pole-aware analog placement method considering symmetry-island, monotonic current flow, and crossing-wire minimization results in much better solution quality in terms of circuit performance.

Analog IC designers and design houses have been accumulating their own design knowledge and constructing their own analog design repositories, including various design specifications, applications, and process technologies. As most of the analog layouts are handcrafted art works, different designers/companies may have different layout guidelines and preferences. When generating a new layout for certain analog design which already exists or is similar to any of those in the repositories, but with different circuit parameters or process technology files, applying layout migration is usually more preferable than starting from scratch. This paper introduces a holistic framework and new layout generation methodology to achieve analog layout integrity through learning and migration. The introduced methodology can effectively and efficiently preserve the preferences of placement and routing topologies from legacy layouts to new ones.

Modern analog placement techniques require consideration of current path and symmetry constraints. The symmetry pairs can be efficiently packed using the symmetry island configurations, but not all these configurations result in minimum gate interconnection, which can impact the overall circuit routing and performance. This article proposes the first work that reformulates this problem considering all of them together in the form of parallel current path (PCP) constraints. PCP constraints, in addition to monotonic current paths, also consider partial-monotonic current paths to generate a more compact placement. We use a novel two-step approach to detect symmetry-feasible sequence-pairs (SFSPs) without doing placement construction by using representative sequence-pair (RSP). Then a placement algorithm satisfying these constraints is formulated to reduce a vast search space via efficient sequence pair manipulation. The experimental results show that this formulation and algorithm can generate multiple placement solutions that satisfy all the constraints in a more tightly packed configuration, resulting in smaller wirelength, reduced parasitics, and thus better post-layout performance.

Modern analog placement techniques require consideration of current path and symmetry constraints. The symmetry pairs can be efficiently packed using the symmetry island configurations, but not all these configurations result in minimum gate interconnection, which can impact the overall circuit routing and performance. This paper proposes the first work that reformulates this problem considering all of them together in the form of Parallel Current Path (PCP) constraints. Then a placement algorithm satisfying these constraints is formulated to reduce a vast search space via efficient sequence pair manipulation. Experimental results show that this formulation and algorithm can satisfy all the constraints in a more tightly packed configuration, resulting in lesser routing length, reduced parasitics and thus better post-layout performance.