AdreamDCO: AI-Driven Robust and Efficient Design Automation for Digitally Controlled Oscillators

This paper presents how we leverage AI-human collaboration to develop an end-to-end, automated design flow for digitally controlled oscillators (DCOs), a key radio-frequency (RF) integrated circuits (ICs) building block that dominates phase noise and jitter performance of RF systems. Specifically, we decompose the DCO design process into two steps and use AI to enhance productivity and optimize performance within each step. Additionally, we demonstrate how AI can assist RF IC designers in creating unconventional circuit components to tackle challenging design specifications. Overall, the proposed flow is capable of synthesizing the DCO design including the schematic and layout in 80 seconds after one-time training, and is frequency agile between 1 and 20 GHz. Moreover, it can select the most robust design under process variations when multiple design parameters meet target specifications under the nominal condition. The proposed automated DCO design flow is demonstrated using two silicon prototypes implemented in the GlobalFoundries $22-\mathrm{nm}$ CMOS SOI process. In the measurements, they achieve $\gt 192.4-\mathrm{dBc} / \mathrm{Hz}$ figure-of-merit (FoM) and $\lt 1.5-\mathrm{kHz}$ frequency resolution at 7.1 to 8.6 GHz and 3.8 to 4.6 GHz, outperforming existing manual designs at similar frequencies.