Automated Creation of Reusable Generators for Analog IC Design with the Intelligent IP Method

Procedural generators are often proposed for analog IC design automation. They promise to encapsulate designer knowledge and intellectual property (IP) data in a deterministic and reusable way. While recent developments claim to have proven this, one question remains: How to create generators efficiently and integrate them in an automated design flow? A major challenge for generators is the trade-off between initial implementation effort, reusability, and acceptance. This raises further questions on the role of the generator supplier: Who should spend the effort implementing and maintaining generator IP? Which interfaces and standards can be used to implement and integrate them into common design environments? In order to address these challenges, we propose a combination of pre-defined generators for basic building blocks at lower hierarchy levels with automatic creation of generators using place and route templates for more complex circuits. The paper demonstrates the successful application of this flow to an OTA design and discusses the required implementation efforts, quality of the generated results and potential future developments.