Analog Layout Synthesis: a Survey of Topological Approaches

Integrated circuits are fundamental electronic components in biomedical, automotive and many other technical systems. A small, yet crucial part of a chip consists of analog circuitry. This part is still in large part designed by hand and therefore represents not only a bottleneck in the design flow, but also a permanent source of design errors responsible for re-designs, costly in terms of wasted test chips and in terms of lost time-to-market. Layout design is the step of the analog design flow with the least support by commercially available, computer-aided design tools. This book provides a survey of promising new approaches to automated, analog layout design, which have been described recently and are rapidly being adopted in industry.