Intelligent and Interactive Analog Layout Design Automation

Automating analog layout design has long been considered a challenging problem. The literature has been exploring fully automated analog layout tools, while designers still adopt manual methodologies in practice, due to the performance gap between generated layouts and manually crafted ones. Although fully automated tools cannot generate flawless solutions yet, we can enhance the design practice by incorporating designers’ expertise with intelligent and efficient automation process. In this paper, we discuss two potential directions to leverage designers’ expertise, i.e., by utilizing machine intelligence to learn from existing manual layouts, and allowing designers to efficiently edit layouts with real-time interaction. We survey the recent work dedicated to these two directions and hope to inspire more studies.