Configurable Analog and Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits: Design and Optimization

Long design cycles due to the inability to predict silicon realities is a well-known problem that plagues analog/RF integrated circuit product development. As this problem worsens for nanoscale IC technologies, the high cost of design and multiple manufacturing spins causes fewer products to have the volume required to support full custom implementation. We propose a regular analog/RF IC using metal-mask configurability design methodology ORACLE, which is a combination of reuse and shared-use by formulating the synthesis problem as an optimization with recourse problem. Using a two-stage geometric programming with recourse approach, ORACLE solves for both the globally optimal shared and application-specific variables. Furthermore, robust optimization is proposed to treat the design with variability issue, further enhancing the ORACLE methodology by providing yield bound for each configuration of regular designs.