Automatic Synthesis of CMOS Digital/Analog Converters by Robert McKinstry Robinson Neff Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering -- Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California at Berkeley Professor Paul R. Gray, Chair Synthesis of analog functional blocks in integrated circuits offers promise for improved designer productivity. By developing module generators for commonly used analog circuit elements, a synthesis methodology may be matched to a particular application, with approaches and algorithms determined by the particular needs of target circuit type. An analog circuit designer should be able to input design specifications and underlying technology information, and a synthesis methodology should determine circuit parameter values and dimensions, creating the required mask layouts. Slow, tedious design and redesign methods should be replaced by one in which the computer finds minimum cost designs which meet performance requirements. This work implements synthesis methods for a widely used analog block, the digital/analog converter (DAC).

The research presented in this paper is concerned with the design automation of analog integrated circuits, simply called analog synthesis. A new algorithm, namely a simulated annealing algorithm with multi-molecule (SAMM), is proposed to solve analog synthesis problems. Besides inheriting the global convergence of the traditional simulated annealing algorithm (SA), SAMM can avoid the excessively time-consuming final iterations of SA, which makes it more efficient and suitable for analog synthesis. Several analog synthesis examples are also given in this paper to demonstrate the efficiency and validity of SAMM.