Efficient handling of operating range and manufacturing line variations inanalog cell synthesis

We describe a synthesis system that takes operating range constraints and i nter and intracircuit parametric manufacturing variations into account whil e designing a sized and biased analog circuit. Previous approaches to compu ter-aided design fur analog circuit synthesis have concentrated on nominal analog circuit design, and subsequent optimization of these circuits for st atistical fluctuations and operating point ranges. Our approach simultaneou sly synthesizes and optimizes for operating and manufacturing variations by mapping the circuit design problem into an Infinite Programming problem an d solving it using an annealing within annealing formulation. We present ci rcuits designed by this integrated synthesis system, and show that they ind eed meet their operating range and parametric manufacturing constraints. An d finally, we show that our consideration of variations during the initial optimization-based circuit synthesis leads to better starting points for po st-synthesis yield optimization than a classical nominal synthesis approach .