Georges Gielen

KU Leuven, Belgium

Machine-learning-based synthesis of analog integrated circuits exploiting the self-learning of design expertise

Abstract

Electronics applications that interact with the physical world (e.g. environmental sensing, healthcare, autonomous vehicles, etc.) need analog integrated circuits in the cyber-physical or edge layer. But whereas digital circuits are largely synthesized automatically through software, the analog circuits surprisingly are mainly still handcrafted in industry, resulting in low design productivity with long and error-prone design cycles and high development costs. It becomes even more problematic when moving to advanced technologies below 16 nm CMOS, that come with way more design and layout rules to be dealt with. The showstopper for state-of-the-art analog synthesis tools is that they require the proper and often circuit-specific design heuristics and constraints to be entered explicitly by designers in order to handle the humongous solution space and to steer the circuit and layout optimizations towards acceptable solutions. This presentation will present an alternative methodology based on advanced machine learning techniques to self-learn and then exploit the design expertise and constraints from the many available successfully completed designs. These innovations may enable to finally synthesize analog circuits from specifications to layout in fully autonomous way, without human designer in the loop.

Biography

Georges G.E. Gielen is Full Professor in the MICAS research division at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT) at KU Leuven. Since 2020 he is Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering. His research interests are in the design of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits, and especially in analog and mixed-signal CAD tools and design automation. He is a frequently invited speaker/lecturer and coordinator/partner of several (industrial) research projects in this area, including several European projects. He has (co-)authored 10 books and more than 600 papers in edited books, international journals and conference proceedings. He is a 1997 Laureate of the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences, Literature and Arts in the discipline of Engineering. He is Fellow of the IEEE since 2002, and received the IEEE CAS Mac Van Valkenburg award in 2015 and the IEEE CAS Charles Desoer award in 2020. He is an elected member of the Academia Europaea.