Analog Chip Design is an Art. Can AI Help?

Here’s the video:

I want to call out a Substack written by a friend. Tanj boasts a monstrous boatload of knowledge about semiconductor manufacturing - particularly in memory. He recently started his new Substack and I want you all to go subscribe to it. Like now.

This below post on FinFETs is extremely informative and I loved it.

Poratbo

Pipe.3: The Chip Base and the Basics

In the last post the scope of the cell library was described. It will be for static logic design, with around 30 of the most useful and optimizable logic building blocks, including some of the circuits for clocking and latches, and the largets cells will be full adders. Now we get started…

Read more

2 years ago · 2 likes · Tanj

Almost every integrated circuit will have an analog component. That component is often pretty small. Sometimes as little as 3% of the total thing.

Yet this tiny little piece of analog circuitry regularly takes up over half of the integrated circuit's total design cost.

That is because analog chip design is a goshdarn art. Hand-drawn by a chip-Michelangelo staring up at the ceiling night after night.

And if there is one thing we all know, it is that computers can't do art like artists can ... right? In this video, we are going to talk about the art of analog circuit design and AI’s potential to help.

Beginnings

The digital world is made up of 1s and 0s.

But the real world is analog.

Transistors are well suited for digital signals. They either open the floodgates and let the current saturate: 1. Or they shut the gate and let nothing through - 0.

Analog signals aren't like that. They are continuous - a waveform where each value in the signal is not abruptly different from the previous or the next value.

Common analog signals include those for sound, temperature, pressure, and electrical voltage. These things come from the real world.

Digital on the other hand is all about numbers - a concept that humans made up.

Analog Systems

Analog electronics take in these analog signals and do things to them in order to create a desired output.

Every integrated circuit or system-on-chip has an analog component. Information from a sensor or a transducer might first enter the circuit as an analog signal.

Transducers are devices that convert one form of energy into ...