Multi-port multi-terminal analog router based on an evolutionary optimization kernel

Abstract

In the state-of-the-art on analog integrated circuit (IC) automatic routing approaches it is assumed that each terminal has only one port that can be routed, however, in practice a device usually contains multiple electrically-equivalent locations where the connection can be made, multi-port terminals, which are not properly explored. This paper describes an innovative evolutionary approach with multi-port multiterminal (MP/MT) nets for analog IC automatic routing. The netlist and the multi-port terminals are modeled in a Group-Steiner problem that is solved by the Global Router, to obtain the terminal-to-terminal connectivity, and then, for the detailed routing, an optimization kernel is used, namely, an enhanced version of the multi-objective evolutionary algorithm NSGA-II. The Router starts by a single-net procedure, and culminates in a process where all nets are optimized simultaneously. The technology design rules are verified during the evolutionary generation using an in-loop built-in layout evaluation procedure. The automatic routing generation is detailed, and demonstrated for the generation of the layout of a typical analog circuit, for the UMC 130nm design process. The automatically generated layouts are validated using the industrial grade Calibre® tool and the performances of the extracted circuits are compared with the ones achieved in the circuit-level design.