Variation-Aware Macromodeling and Synthesis of Analog Circuits Using Spline Center and Range Method and Dynamically Reduced Design Space

Abstract

Manufacturing and process irregularities in nanometer technologies can degrade yield and severely slow down the design cycle time. Process variation aware methodologies can help in yield improvement and meeting time-to-market requirements for system-on-chip designs. Analog circuits are extremely sensitive to device mismatches and exhibit non-linear variations in their performance under the influence of manufacturing irregularities. Performance variation in blocks can lead to degraded system performance. In this work, we present a variation-aware performance macromodeling technique for analog building blocks that is fast and accurate and guarantees convergence during synthesis. The improvements in accuracy and time complexity of the macromodel generation process is achieved by constructing a target design region graph and dynamic reduction of the design space. The target design region also helps in reducing time during re-synthesis and achieving faster convergence. Experimental results demonstrate the accuracy of the macromodels and the reduction in synthesis time compared to spice based simulation-in-the-loop evaluations and static and adaptive sampling based techniques.