Importance sampled circuit learning ensembles for robust analog IC design

ABSTRACT

This paper presents ISCLEs, a novel and robust analog design method that promises to scale with Moore's Law, by doing boosting-style importance sampling on digital-sized circuits to achieve the target analog behavior. ISCLEs consists of: (1) a boosting algorithm developed specifically for circuit assembly; (2) an ISCLEs-specific library of possible digital-sized circuit blocks; and (3) a recently-developed multi-topology sizing technique to automatically determine each block's topology and device sizes. ISCLEs is demonstrated on design of a sinusoidal function generator and a flash A/D converter, showing promise to robustly scale with shrinking process geometries.

REFERENCES

• 1: G. E. Moore,- Cramming- more- components- onto- integrated- circuits. - Electronics-Magazine- 38(8),- April- 19,-1965-
• 2: "International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors," 2007. http://public.itrs.net
• 3: M. J. M. Pelgrom, et al., "Matching Properties of MOS Transistor", IEEE JSSC 24 (5), Oct. 1989, pp. 1433--1440
• 4: Willy M. C. Sansen, Analog Design Essentials (The International Series in Engineering and Computer Science), Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 2006
• 5: D. Johns & K. Martin, Analog Integrated Circuit Design, Wiley 1997
• 6: Rob A. Rutenbar , T. Bonaccio , T. Meng , E. Perea , R. Pitts , C. Sodinii , J. Wieser, Will Moore's Law rule in the land of analog?, Proceedings of the 41st annual conference on Design automation, June 07-11, 2004, San Diego, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/996566.996739]
• 7: Georges Gielen , Wim Dehaene , Phillip Christie , Dieter Draxelmayr , Edmond Janssens , Karen Maex , Ted Vucurevich, Analog and Digital Circuit Design in 65 nm CMOS: End of the Road?, Proceedings of the conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe, p.36-42, March 07-11, 2005 [doi>10.1109/DATE.2005.64]
• 8: Carver Mead , Lynn Conway, Introduction to VLSI Systems, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1979
• 9: T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, J. H. Friedman. The Elements of Statistical Learning. Springer, 2001
• 10: R. Polikar, "Ensemble Based Systems in Decision Making," IEEE Circuits and System Magazine, Third quarter 2006
• 11: Yoav Freund , Robert E. Schapire, A decision-theoretic generalization of on-line learning and an application to boosting, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, v.55 n.1, p.119-139, Aug. 1997 [doi>10.1006/jcss.1997.1504]
• 12: Jerome H. Friedman, Stochastic gradient boosting, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, v.38 n.4, p.367-378, 28 February 2002 [doi>10.1016/S0167-9473(01)00065-2]
• 13: J. Friedman, B. Popescu, "Importance Sampled Learning Ensembles", Tech. Report, Stanford U. Dept. Statistics, 2003
• 14: Trent McConaghy , Pieter Palmers , Georges Gielen , Michiel Steyaert, Simultaneous multi-topology multi-objective sizing across thousands of analog circuit topologies, Proceedings of the 44th annual conference on Design automation, June 04-08, 2007, San Diego, California [doi>10.1145/1278480.1278712]
• 15: P. A. Whigham, "Grammatically-based Genetic Programming," Proc. Workshop on GP: From Theory to Real-World Applications, J. R. Rosca, ed., 1995
• 16: R. v. d. Plassche, CMOS Integrated Analog-to-Digital and Digital-to-Analog Converters, 2nd ed., Kluwer, 2003

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.1 Types and Design Styles

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.2 Design Aids