Efficient Performance Modeling for Automated CMOS Analog Circuit Synthesis

Fast and accurate performance estimation can significantly enhance the efficiency of automated analog circuit synthesis. This article presents a novel performance modeling method that can efficiently estimate circuit performance with ignorable model building overhead for variant circuit topologies. The proposed method starts with accurate transistor modeling by taking advantage of the advanced neural network (NN) fitting technique. It then utilizes the established transistor models and topology information from a circuit netlist to precisely discover the circuit dc operating point. Specialized deterministic schemes have been developed with the aid of an undirected bipartite graph converted from the circuit netlist. Moreover, the accurate NN transistor models help directly derive the small-signal model parameter values, which can be further applied to conduct symbolic analysis to evaluate circuit performances. Our experimental results not only compare various deterministic dc operating point computation schemes but also demonstrate the efficient model development, general applicability, speedy execution, and fair prediction of our proposed performance modeling method.