Open Source AMS Design with Optimization Tools
Modern SoCs are ever increasing in design complexity. Additionally, new process technologies have increasingly complex design rules and parasitic sensitivity, which increases iteration time in AMS circuit design cycles. Generators (namely Berkeley Analog Generator) can alleviate these problems by shortening design time for AMS circuits. Furthermore, growing interest in chip design has resulted in new open source design processes (i.e. Skywater 130nm). In this context, ADCs are a integral part of SoCs by bridging the analog and digital domains. SAR ADCs in particular have gained popularity in recent years for their low power consumption and high sample rate. We thus target it as an example of a fully automated AMS design and layout flow with optimization through the OptDesigner features in BAG3.The goals of this work are to develop an end to end circuit designer for the SAR architecture at moderate resolution and frequency, and do so with an open source process so that our work may be publically released. This work further serves as a springboard for ongoing work in generative AMS circuit design to explore topology novelty at the transistor level and intuitive circuit representations adapted for use in machine learning applications.
Expected Graduation Date:
May, 2026
