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.

A new CAD tool used for the interactive exploration of a design space has been developed. The interactive nature of the tool facilitates the acquisition of designer knowledge which may accelerate the development of improved circuit topologies in the future. The tool's cross-platform compatibility and network centric architecture prevents reinvention and facilitates organization-wide or worldwide communication via design knowledge repositories. To demonstrate its utility in the area of analog circuit design, the tool was used to model the design tradeoffs available during the design of a telescopic cascode amplifier. There was good agreement between the response predicted by the new tool and a full SPICE simulation. 1.