Variation-Aware Structural Synthesis of Analog Circuits via Hierarchical Building Blocks and Structural Homotopy

Abstract

This paper presents MOJITO-R, a tool that performs variation-aware structural synthesis of analog circuits. It returns trustworthy topologies by searching across a space of thousands of possible topologies defined by hierarchically organized analog structural building blocks. ldquoStructural homotopyrdquo conducts search at several objective-function tightening levels (numbers of process corners) simultaneously. Multiobjective evolutionary search returns sized topologies which trade off power, area, performances, and <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">yield</i> . An experimental validation run returned 78 643 Pareto-optimal designs, having 982 sized topologies with various specification/yield combinations. A decision tree is extracted to visualize the performance-topology relationship.