Towards Active-Passive Co-synthesis of Multi-gigaHertz Radio Frequency Circuits

This paper proposes a methodology and framework for rapid active-passive co-synthesis of radio frequency circuits. The presented approach leverages advances in accelerated three-dimensional electromagnetic simulation technology to construct Maxwell-accurate parametric macromodels of on-chip passives, in particular spiral inductors. These macromodels can be used in the context of SPICE-level synthesis, thereby enabling concurrent sizing of passive and active components of radio frequency circuits. Moreover, macromodels obviate the need for topology exploration and parametric RLC model generation via optimization for on-chip passives. The co-synthesis framework is enabled by nonlinear, hyper-dimensional regression for macromodel generation and a simulated annealing based optimization scheme. As examples, and to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach, two standard low-noise amplifier topologies are synthesized with tight performance constraints by co-optimization of circuit parameters and inductor geometries.