MAGICAL: An Open- Source Fully Automated Analog IC Layout System from Netlist to GDSII

This article presents MAGICAL, which is a fully automated analog IC layout system. MAGICAL takes a netlist and design rules as inputs, and it produces the final GDS layout in a fully automated fashion.

Magical Framework

The overall flow of MAGICAL is shown in Figure 1. It takes an unannotated circuit netlist and design rules as inputs, and produces a complete GDSII layout as output fully automatically without human designers in the loop. The entire flow consists of four major modules, with each module being independent with a user-friendly Python interface. The design rules and the extracted layout constraints are honored throughout the entire back-end flow. Figure 1.

MAGICAL framework. (a) MAGICAL submodules. (b) MAGICAL hierarchical flow.