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

目前，几乎所有的模拟集成电路(IC)都是手工设计的，导致生产率和性能低下。该研究项目的目标是通过显著提高设计自动化程度来改变模拟电路的设计方式。如果成功，将大大缩短上市时间，增加系统容量，降低设计成本，降低芯片故障率。拟议的研究课题为电路设计社区和电子设计自动化(EDA)社区搭建了桥梁，启动了合作和共同开发。在应用方面，拟议的新型模拟电路设计方法将成为物联网、5G蜂窝通信、可穿戴电子产品和自动驾驶汽车等新兴应用的催化剂。在教育方面，将开发一门新的专门课程，以帮助设计师采用拟议的新型模拟IC设计方法。PIS还将继续在研究生指导、少数族裔外展、当地社区服务以及建立德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校与当地行业之间的密切联系方面发挥积极作用。目前存在两种现有的模拟设计流程。一种是经典的手工设计方法。尽管它被广泛接受，但它的生产率和精度都很低，这是因为人类在复杂的数值计算和多维优化方面效率低下的硬事实。另一种是模拟IC设计自动化(ADA)，它将电路设计视为一个黑箱优化问题，并用强大的优化算法进行求解。尽管它的效率很高，但由于不可靠，ADA的接受度有限。这些算法不理解电路，导致只有数字意义的不切实际的综合结果。模拟IC设计无论是高层推理还是底层计算都是复杂的，因此，仅靠人或算法是不够的。为了解决这一困境，提出了一种集成了人机智能(HMI)的模拟IC设计方法。它的目标是将设计师放在中心位置，并为他们提供新颖的互动工具。本项目的具体研究内容包括：1)HMI引导的交互式原理图设计工具；2)HMI引导的交互式版图设计工具；3)HMI引导的交互式模拟设计方法学和硅验证；4)HMI引导的交互式电路体系结构的选择和创建；5)总体框架和工具包。

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.