Late Breaking Results: Opera: An Open and Efficient Platform for Data-driven Synthesis of Analog Circuits

The front-end synthesis of analog circuits has been a long-standing challenge since the advent of integrated circuits. Many methods, ranging from conventional optimization-based techniques to emerging learning-based approaches, have been extensively explored to address this challenge. Yet, these methods are data-driven and often suffer from low design efficiency, due to their heavy reliance on time-consuming circuit simulators, which are frequently used in the synthesis loop for real-time evaluation of the evolving circuit design. In addition, benchmarking these methods is also largely unachievable due to their exclusive use of commercial semiconductor technology for evaluation. This “Late Breaking Results” introduces Opera, an open and efficient platform for the data-driven synthesis of analog circuits. Specifically, Opera develops efficient surrogate models for various circuits and integrates them into open-source OpenAI Gym-like environments to enable efficient synthesis. Case studies on exemplary circuits show that this platform can accelerate the conventional data-driven synthesis flow by up to $40 \times$. It also enables the benchmarking of various synthesis methods with standardized environments built upon an open-source semiconductor process.