Tutorial and Perspectives on MAGICAL: A Silicon-Proven Open-Source Analog IC Layout System

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems. II, Express briefs Vol. 70; no. 2; pp. 715 - 720
• Main Authors: Zhu, Keren, Chen, Hao, Liu, Mingjie, Pan, David Z.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.02.2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Analog circuits; CADCAM; design automation; Electronic design automation and methodology; Engines; Layout; Layouts; Performance evaluation; Pins; Python; Routing; Silicon; Source code; Tutorials
• ISSN: 1549-7747; 1558-3791
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSII.2022.3172869

MAGICAL is an open-source system for analog and mixed-signal (AMS) circuit layout synthesis. Using custom place-and-route and constraint extraction algorithms, MAGICAL provides a fully-automated layout implementation flow. MAGICAL 1.0 has been proven in silicon with a 40-nm 1GS/s <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\Delta \Sigma </tex-math></inline-formula> ADC. The source code has been released to enable broad usage. Recently, MAGICAL has also been extended to cover more circuit classes such as SAR-ADC. This tutorial/perspective paper describes the overall MAGICAL framework and algorithms. We also provide a tutorial on how to use and extend MAGICAL and discuss future research directions for AMS layout design automation.