MAGICAL 1.0: An Open-Source Fully-Automated AMS Layout Synthesis Framework Verified With a 40-nm 1GS/s Δ∑ ADC

The layout process is incredibly tedious as it is being exacerbated by technology scaling, where design rules become increasingly complicated in advanced nodes. While digital blocks' layout can be easily synthesized, analog/mixed-signal (AMS) layout designs are still heavily manual, setting bottlenecks for time-to-market. Though endeavored in research for decades, the automation of AMS circuit layouts has not been as successful as its digital counterpart. The reason is rooted in the sensitiveness and complexity of AMS circuits layouts [1]. Researchers have proposed specialized digital-like AMS circuit architectures [2],[3], which are robust against layout mismatches. Those circuit architectures can be synthesized using commercial digital place-and-route (P&R) tools but fail to produce a general-purpose solution to other circuit architectures. On the other hand, procedure-based methodologies have been proposed to synthesize AMS circuits based on parameterized layout templates [4]. Procedure-based layout generators provide a standardized flow to migrate circuit layouts to different circuit sizings and manufacturing technologies. Still, they require a significant amount of manual effort to program the layout templates. While there are attempts to apply P&R algorithms on AMS layouts [1], to the best of the authors' knowledge, no prior work has demonstrated a silicon-proven fully automated layout of a real-world mixed-signal system.