Automatic Design for W-Band Front-End System via Bottom-Up Sizing and Layout Generation

In recent years, electronic design automation methodologies based on hierarchical multilevel bottom-up (BU) design approaches are emerging and successfully applied for RF system design. In this article, we propose a design automation methodology for the synthesis of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) systems via BU approaches, including sizing and layout generation. First, uniformly sampled passive and active component libraries with prepared layouts and S-parameter files are constructed during the offline preparation stage. Second, the BU sizing from the device level to the system level has been demonstrated via multiobjective optimization algorithms, while an improved Euclidean mapping strategy is proposed to efficiently search over circuit-level Pareto-optimal fronts (POFs) in the system-level optimization. Third, the parameterized DRC/LVS clean layout can be hierarchically generated for the system-level POFs. Compared to flat optimization at the system level, the proposed method greatly reduces the size of the search space with the highest accuracy possible and can be used for the synthesis of complex mm-wave systems. The proposed method achieves a $10\times $ runtime speedup in the system-level optimization with better optimization results.