LDO Design Automation
The design and verification process for analog circuits can be long and tedious, wherein designers rely heavily on manual effort to create circuits and draw layouts, thereby limiting turn-around-time and design scale and increasing costs. Various previous works have tried to solve this issue by leveraging digital automated place-and-route (APR) tools, but they involve replacing analog elements with digital counterparts, thereby dampening performance. In this work, we propose a digital flow-based approach to design all-analog circuits that dramatically speeds up the design and layout process while retaining the benefits of true analog topologies and demonstrate the performance for three low-dropout regulators (LDOs). Fabricated in 65-nm CMOS, measurement results show that the generated LDOs achieve up to 99.95% peak current efficiency, a figure-of-merit (FOM) of 4.6 ps, and up to 63.93% reduction in input offset variability with respect to their manually designed counterparts. |