SODAC

Abstract

It is of common use that analog designers start by optimizing the basic building bloc forming an active circuit in order to ‘optimally’ size the latter. Even though it is known a priori that the overall circuit performances will differ from the expected ones, due to the fact that the performances of the basic cells will (considerably) change because of the surrounding circuitry, such approach is very widely used. This is mainly due to the complexity of these ‘complex’ circuits. It has recently been shown that the simulation based sizing technique is a very interesting spare solution, since it allows avoiding the (very) ‘complex’ modeling task. In this paper the authors propose a simulation based optimizing tool that can handle both mono-objective and multi-objective optimization sizing problems. Viability and benefits of this tool are highlighted through some examples. Obtained results are compared to the ideal expected ones and to the ones that are obtained using the conventional approaches.