Development of a flexible analog IP library

Abstract

In this thesis, an analog circuit synthesis and design assistant tool is proposed. The developed tool employs an SPEA2 algorithm as a multi-objective optimization engine to generate Pareto-optimal Fronts (PoF) for a given design problem. An analog library serving as analog IP, was also constructed, which includes pre-optimized PoFs and extracted PoF models for different loading and power limitation conditions. Thus, the user can either generate a new PoF for her/his problem or use the pre-existing PoFs as well as the extracted models without running any optimization step. The developed tool can also be utilized for feasibility checking of a circuit, performance prediction, and topology selection. The tool gives the opportunity of visualization of the design solutions, by allowing the user to verify the Pareto-optimal points in the test benches, to observe the design specifications of a specific design solution. A graphical user interface (GUI) is developed to combine all these utilities. To demonstrate the developed tool, two different OTA topologies and a comparator are examined and all parts of the tool were discussed in detail. Finally, the POFs of the OTA and comparator circuits are composed to obtain the PoF of a higher-level block.