SHF: Medium: Integrating Human and Machine Intelligence for Next Generation Interactive Analog IC Design

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At present, almost all analog integrated circuits (ICs) are designed manually, leading to low productivity and low performance. The goal of this research project is to change the way analog circuits are designed by significantly increasing design automation. If successful, it will greatly shorten the time-to-market, increase the system capability, reduce the design cost, and lower the chip failure rate. The proposed research topic bridges the circuit design community with the electronic design automation (EDA) community, initiating collaboration and co-development. On the application side, the proposed novel analog circuit design methodology will serve as the catalyst for emerging applications, such as IoT, 5G cellular communication, wearable electronics, and self-driving vehicles. On the educational side, a new and dedicated course will be developed to facilitate designers to adopt the proposed novel analog IC design methodology. The PIs will also continue their active roles in graduate student mentoring, minority outreach, local community service, and settling up close ties between UT Austin and local industry. There are two existing analog design flows in existence today. One is the classic manual design methodology. Despite wide acceptance, it has low productivity and low accuracy, which results from the hard fact that human beings are inefficient at complicated numerical computation and multi-dimensional optimization. The other is analog IC design automation (ADA), which treats circuit design as a black-box optimization problem and solves it by powerful optimization algorithms. Despite its high efficiency, ADA has received limited acceptance due to unreliability. The algorithms do not understand circuits, leading to unpractical synthesis results that only make numerical sense. Analog IC design is complex both in high-level reasoning and low-level computation, thus, neither human nor algorithm alone is adequate. To address this dilemma, a new analog IC design methodology that integrates both human and machine intelligence (HMI) is proposed. Its goal is to place the designers at the center and empower them with novel interactive tools. The specific research thrusts of this project include: 1) HMI guided interactive schematic design tools; 2) HMI guided interactive layout design tools; 3) HMI guided interactive analog design methodology and silicon validation; 4) HMI guided interactive circuit architecture selection and creation; 5) overall framework and toolkit.