The design of analog integrated circuits (ICs) is
characterized by time-consuming and non-systematic iterations
between electrical and physical design steps in order to achieve
successful post-layout designs. This paper presents an innovative
methodology for automatic optimization-based sizing of analog
ICs that takes into consideration complete layout-related data for
both circuit’s geometric requirements, which are obtained from
the real-time in-loop floorplan packing, and circuits’ electrical
performance that is evaluated using circuit simulator and
considering accurate layout parasitic estimates. In order to boost
the parasitic extraction efficiency, the need for expensive detailed
layout generation, as found in previous state-of-the-art layoutaware
sizing approaches, is here circumvented. However, the
interconnect parasitic capacitances that are major contributors
to performance degradation and on-die signal integrity problems,
must be accurately accounted for. Therefore, an empirical-based
parasitic extraction is performed on an early-stage layout
obtained from the floorplan, computing the optimal
electromigration-aware wiring topology and shortest rectilinear
paths in-loop, without the need for detailed routing. Finally, the
methodology is demonstrated for the UMC 130nm design process
using well-known analog building blocks proving the generality,
accuracy and fast execution of the proposed approach.