Analog synthesis tools have failed to migrate into mainstream use primarily because of difficulties in reconciling the simplified models required for synthesis with the industrial-strength simulation environments required for validation. MAELSTROM is a new approach that synthesizes a circuit using the same simulation environment created to validate the circuit. We introduce a novel genetic/ annealing optimizer, and leverage network parallelism to achieve efficient simulator-in-the-loop analog synthesis.

A persistent criticism of analog synthesis techniques is that they cannot cope with the complexity of realistic industrial designs, especially system-level designs. We show how recent advances in simulation-based synthesis can be augmented, via appropriate macromodeling, to attack complex analog blocks. To support this claim, we resynthesize from scratch, in several different styles, a complex equalizer/filter block from the frontend of a commercial ADSL CODEC, and verify by full simulation that it matches its original design specifications. As a result, we argue that synthesis has significant potential in both custom and analog IP reuse scenarios.

This paper presents a heuristic technique for automatically generating different architectures for an analog system. The architecture generator (AG) starts from a signal-flow graph (SFG) specification of a system. The AG iteratively produces various system net-lists as distinct implementations can realize the signal processing and flow in an SFG. Area and power for resulting net-lists are rapidly evaluated with High-Level Performance Estimator (HPE), a simplified estimation module. The AG algorithm is simple to implement. It does not require an extensive pattern library as traditional AG techniques do.