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العنوان
IC Placement Automation
Using Constraints /
المؤلف
Moussa,Sherif Mohamed Saif El-Deen Ibrahim Ali.
هيئة الاعداد
باحث / Sherif Mohamed Saif El-Deen Ibrahim Ali Moussa
مشرف / Salwa Mohamed Mahmoud Nassar
مشرف / Hazem Mahmoud Abbas
مشرف / Mohamed Amin Dessouky
تاريخ النشر
2015
عدد الصفحات
224p.;
اللغة
الإنجليزية
الدرجة
ماجستير
التخصص
هندسة النظم والتحكم
تاريخ الإجازة
1/1/2015
مكان الإجازة
جامعة عين شمس - كلية الهندسة - هندسة الحاسبات والنظم
الفهرس
Only 14 pages are availabe for public view

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Abstract

The increasing functional complexity of system-on-chips, the lack of
design automation for analog circuits, and the difficulties in analog design
continually increase the bottleneck of analog components in chip design.
Automation of analog layout and analog placement has been a research
interest since the late 1980s. Layout of analog Integrated Circuits (IC’s)
has been manually designed by experts. Analog placers use a variety of
mostly hand-entered physical constraints for design rules, placement and
certain analog-specific layout conventions to automatically generate small
sections of layout. The placement and the routing of an analog circuit
have a severe impact on the function and performance. Thus, layout
constraints are defined to make sure that the circuit fulfills the
performance specifications. The number and diversity of constraints
imposed on an analog circuit prevent approaches used in the digital
domain from being used for analog design. With advanced nodes, a layout
that meets every physical constraint can still fail to meet the electrical
requirements of the design. Designers are quick to recognize the
appropriate physical constraints that lead to correct electrical behavior
using their experience. They have the ability to rapidly evaluate multiple
solutions and quickly discard those options whose physical
implementations do not meet the electrical constraints assigned to them.
Hence, the latest generation of analog placement tools has been designed
to create a variety of alternative layouts from which designers can choose.
This puts the designer back into the picture by presenting choices rather
than assuming that the software has chosen the best layout. The designer
can make the choice since layout decisions involve compromise.
Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) is an approach that can be used for
solving constraint satisfaction problems. SMT combines Boolean
satisfiability with term-manipulating symbolic systems. Boolean
satisfiability is concerned with determining whether a formula expressing
a constraint has a solution. Microsoft Z3 SMT solver is used in this work
to find feasible solutions for the given constraints. Hence, the constraints
should be translated into equations that can be understood by the Z3
solver, and afterwards the Z3 solver output should be translated into
coordinates that can be used by the analog placer.
Cloud computing has emerged due to the increasing demand of variable
system requirements and the need for more computing power with different specifications at different time zones. In this research we deploy
the analog placement platform on a cloud computing environment.
The thesis is divided into seven chapters in addition to the lists of
contents, tables and figures as well as list of references and one appendix.
Chapter 1
In this chapter the analog placement concept is introduced, and its
implementation challenges are highlighted. Proliferation of
methodologies for resolving constraints such as satisfiability modulo
theories is mentioned. Emergence of cloud computing and high
performance computing is linked to the mentioned topics. This chapter
includes the thesis introduction and presents its outline.
Chapter 2
This chapter presents a literature survey of analog integrated circuits
placement. In addition it explains the physical constraints of analog
circuits and their types. It also shows the emerging rapid prototyping flow
and the importance of using constraints in this flow.
Chapter 3
This chapter explains SAT and satisfiability modulo theories. It provides
the mathematical background and the methodology used by a solver to
approach any problem. It discusses complexity of problems versus their
tractability and decidability and brings to attention how constraints
resolution can be handled according to this perspective.
Chapter 4
This chapter demonstrates the design details of the proposed system. It
also shows how the satisfiability modulo theories is exactly used to
approach the analog integrated circuits’ placement problem.
Chapter 5
This chapter elaborates on the cloud computing and shows the steps
needed to exploit them in this research. The deployment of the proposed
system on the cloud is presented.
Chapter 6
This chapter shows the results and compares them to other results that
were published in the literature. It shows the timing analysis and the
effect of using the cloud. It discusses the different aspects of this work.
Chapter 7 This chapter ends the thesis by conclusion, summary and future work.
Key words:
Analog Layout, Automation, Cloud Computing, Constraints, Integrated
Circuits, Placement, Satisfiability Modulo Theories.