On minimizing various sources of noise and meeting symmetry constraint in mixed-signal SoC floorplan design

Abstract

In recent years, in order to handle various sources of noise (including substrate and power supply noises) and process variation in high-end mixed-signal circuit design, analog circuits are often required to be placed symmetrically to the common axis, and high noise digital circuits need to be placed far away from noise interference to the analog blocks. In this paper, we obtain the mixed-signal SoC floorplan with the two-phase approach. In the first phase, we place the symmetry groups and non-symmetry blocks by sequence pair representation with improved implementation. In the second phase, we obtain a floorplan with minimized digital blocks noise interference to analog blocks by the effective decap fills with substrate noise model. We have compared our experimental results with the recent works in symmetry constraints and mixed-signal SOC floorplan with minimized substrate noise. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.