MESH: Explicit and flexible generation of analog arrays

摘要

Analog layout design is a costly and error-prone task since analog synthesis is still far from applicable. It is expected that procedural bottom-up generators managing constructive tasks will be part of future synthesis flows. Generators contain expert knowledge implicitly within complex and hard-to-understand source code. Due to a lack of explicit layout definition and uncaptured design intent, generator layouts can hardly be adapted by constructive algorithms directly. Thus, synthesis flows need to adapt layout blocks by varying generator parameters which results in computation-expensive optimization. This paper introduces MESH - a software structure to define detailed and flexible layout generators explicitly. Using MESH, just a few lines of code describe complex layouts while all relations and design intents, such as element positions and routing styles, are captured through abstract commands. As a result, generators are created fast with less programming errors, and constructive algorithms can modify the generator structure directly.