Device-level placement for analog layout: an opportunity for non-slicing topological representations

Layout design for analog circuits has historically been a time consuming, error-prone, manual task. Its complexity results not so much from the number of devices, as from the complex interactions among devices or with the operating environment, and also from continuous-valued performance specifications. This paper addresses the problem of device-level placement for analog layout in a non-traditional way. Different from the traditional approaches-exploring a huge search space with a combinatorial optimization technique, where the cells are represented by means of absolute coordinates, being allowed to illegally overlap during their moves in the chip plane-this paper advocates the use of non-slicing topological representations, like (symmetric-feasible) sequence-pairs, ordered- and binary-trees. Extensive tests, processing industrial analog designs, have shown that using skilfully the symmetry constraints (very typical to analog circuits) to remodel the solution space of the encoding systems, the topological representation techniques can achieve a better computation speed than the traditional approach, while obtaining a similar high quality of the designs