CHIPAIDE: a new approach to analogue integrated circuit design

The prospect of fully automated analogue circuit design by a system whose input is a performance specification and whose output is a mask set, has attracted the attention of researchers for many years, and a few developmental systems are already in existence. The aim of this paper is to describe, necessarily in outline, the CHIPAIDE system currently being developed at Imperial College. Like some other systems, CHIPAIDE contains a knowledge-based circuit generation module and a layout generation module. However, if differs from other systems in the algorithmic bases of these modules, in the inclusion of optimisation and tolerance design modules and, principally, in the close interaction that occurs between the four modules which comprise the CHIPAIDE system. Each module is separately described