Integer programming based topology selection of cell-level analog circuits

A new approach to cell-level analog circuit synthesis is presented. This approach formulates analog synthesis as a Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problem in order to allow simultaneous topology and parameter selection. Topology choices are represented as binary integer variables and design parameters (e.g., device sizes and bias voltages) as continuous variables. Examples using a Branch and Bound method to efficiently solve the MINLP problem for CMOS two-stage op amps are given.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>