MAGICAL: Machine Generated Analog IC Layout

Despite tremendous advancement of digital IC CAD tools over the last few decades, analog IC layout is still heavily manual which is very tedious and error-prone. This talk will discuss the overall objective and preliminary results of MAGICAL, a human-intelligence inspired, fully-automated analog IC layout tool sponsored by the DARPA IDEA program. MAGICAL starts from an unannotated netlist, perform automatic layout constraint generation and device generation, then perform automatic placement, legalization, well generation, followed by automatic routing (including signal and power/clock routing) to obtain GDSII, guided by various analytical, heuristic, and machine learning algorithms. MAGICAL has obtained promising initial results. It will be made open source to the public later in 2019. I will also discuss challenges and future directions.