With advancing process technologies and booming IoT markets, millimeter-wave CMOS RFICs have been widely developed in recent years. Since the performance of CMOS RFICs is very sensitive to the precision of the layout, precise placement of devices and precisely matched microstrip lengths to given values have been a labor-intensive and time-consuming task, and thus become a major bottleneck for time to market. This paper introduces a progressive integer-linear-programming-based method to generate high-quality RFIC layouts satisfying very stringent routing requirements of microstrip lines, including spacing/non-crossing rules, precise length, and bend number minimization, within a given layout area. The resulting RFIC layouts excel in both performance and area with much fewer bends compared with the simulation-tuning based manual layout, while the layout generation time is significantly reduced from weeks to half an hour.
['Tsun-Ming Tseng', 'Bing Li', 'Ching-Feng Yeh', 'Hsiang-Chieh Jhan', 'Zuo-Ming Tsai', 'Mark Po-Hung Lin', 'Ulf Schlichtmann']
Novel CMOS RFIC layout generation with concurrent device placement and fixed-length microstrip routing