MAELSTROM: efficient simulation-based synthesis for custom analog cells

Analog synthesis tools have failed to migrate into mainstream use primarily because of difficulties in reconciling the simplified models required for synthesis with the industrial-strength simulation environments required for validation. MAELSTROM is a new approach that synthesizes a circuit using the same simulation environment created to validate the circuit. We introduce a novel genetic/annealing optimizer, and leverage network parallelism to achieve efficient simulator-in-the-loop analog synthesis.