Multi-placement structures for fast and optimized placement in analog circuit synthesis

The paper presents the novel idea of multi-placement structures, for a fast and optimized placement instantiation in analog circuit synthesis. These structures need to be generated only once for a specific circuit topology. When used in synthesis, these pre-generated structures instantiate various layout floorplans for the various sizes and parameters of a circuit. Unlike procedural layout generators, they enable fast placement of circuits while keeping the quality of the placements at a high level during the synthesis process. The fast placement is a result of high speed instantiation resulting from the efficiency of the multi-placement structure. The good quality of placements derives from the extensive and intelligent search process that is used to build the multi-placement structure. The target benchmarks of these structures are analog circuits in the vicinity of 25 modules. An algorithm for the generation of such multi-placement structures is presented. Experimental results show placement execution times with an average of a few milliseconds making them usable during layout-aware synthesis for optimized placements.