Thermal-Driven Analog Placement Considering Device Matching

Abstract

With the thermal effect, improper analog placements may degrade circuit performance because the thermal impact from power devices can affect electrical characteristics of the thermally-sensitive devices. There is not much previous work that considers the desired placement configuration between power and thermally-sensitive devices for a better thermal profile to reduce the thermally-induced mismatches. This paper first introduces the properties of a desired thermal profile for better thermal matching of the matched devices. It then presents a thermal-driven analog placement methodology to achieve the desired thermal profile and to consider the best device matching under the thermal profile while satisfying the symmetry and the common-centroid constraints. Experimental results based on real analog circuits show that the proposed approach can achieve the best analog circuit performance/accuracy with the least impact due to the thermal gradient, among existing works.