Learning from the Implicit Functional Hierarchy in an Analog Netlist

Abstract

Analog circuit design is characterized by a plethora of implicit design and technology aspects available to the experienced designer. In order to create useful computer-aided design methods, this implicit knowledge has to be captured in a systematic and hierarchical way. A key approach to this goal is to "learn" the knowledge from the netlist of an analog circuit. This requires a library of structural and functional blocks for analog circuits together with their individual constraints and performance equations, graph homomorphism techniques to recognize blocks that can have different structural implementations and I/O pins, as well as synthesis methods that exploit the learned knowledge. In this contribution, we will present how to make use of the functional and structural hierarchy of operational amplifiers. As an application, we explore the capabilities of machine learning in the context of structural and functional properties and show that the results can be substantially improved by pre-processing data with traditional methods for functional block analysis. This claim is validated on a data set of roughly 100,000 readily sized and simulated operational amplifiers.