Multi-Placement Structures for Fast and Optimized Placement in Analog Circuit Synthesis

This paper presents the novel idea of multi-placement struc-tures, for a fast and optimized placement instantiation in ana-log 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 floor-plans for various sizes and parameters of a circuit. Unlike pro-cedural layout generators, they enable fast placement of circuits while keeping the quality of the placements at a high level during a 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 derive from the ex-tensive and intelligent search process that is used to build the multi-placement structure. The target benchmarks of these struc-tures are analog circuits in the vicinity of 25 modules. An al-gorithm 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 dur-ing layout-aware synthesis for optimized placements. 1