Joint Placement Optimization for Hierarchical Analog/Mixed-Signal Circuits

The performance of Analog/Mixed Signal (AMS) circuits is highly dependent on the meticulous layout implementation. To meet performance and area requirements, real-world AMS layout design is thoroughly optimized to consider circuit hierarchy and a multitude of factors, such as system signal flow and regularity. Circuit hierarchy and these factors impose complicated constraints, which challenge layout design flow. In this paper, we propose a systematic AMS placement framework to address the challenges through joint optimization. We implement our framework in a unified and highly extensible workflow and validate our framework with broad types of real-world AMS circuits. Experiments show that our framework achieves promising results in both efficiency and quality.