VSAGE: An End-to-End Automated VCO-Based ΔΣ ADC Generator

This article presents VSAGE, an agile end-to-end automated voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO)-based $\Delta \Sigma $ analog-to-digital converter (ADC) generator. It exploits time-domain architectures and design mindset, so that the design flow is highly oriented around digital standard cells in contrast to the transistor-level-focused approach in conventional analog design. Through this, it speeds up and simplifies both the synthesis phase and layout phase. Combined with an efficient knowledge-machine learning (ML)-guided synthesis flow, it can translate input specifications to a full system layout with reliable performance within minutes. This work also features a compact oscillator and system modeling method that facilitates light-resource accurate computation and network training. The generator is verified with 12 design cases in 65-nm and 28-nm processes, proving its capability of generating competitive design with good process portability.