Analog design automation: Pipe dream or inevitability?

By _Planet Analog

July 21, 2022

To start, I am not a career analog design engineer. I have worked for years as an analog/RF design engineer, including a stint in analog/mixed-signal IC design and layout. I also studied control systems and machine learning (ML) pretty deeply for several years, and since then, I have kept marginally well up to date with the data science. These days, I do a good bit of consulting, RF contract design, and a lot of engineering writing. Hence, I am daily reading and researching various engineering, physics, and materials science topics that pertain to electronics, mostly RF and analog. What I am not doing daily is bludgeoning transistors into submission, running sims until my eyes bleed, or playing tetris in a layout editor to wrangle parasitics that are determined to make me look like a fool.

This is why I defer to our esteemed analog design engineer audience on the nuances and vagaries of analog. However, I do have thoughts every now and again. Today, I am having thoughts about a few different blogs and articles I have read about automating analog design. The blogs and articles I have read are mostly from electronic design automation (EDA) software companies. In these written works, I notice a general theme that whoever is writing them seems to believe that analog design, at least in a somewhat significant way, can be automated. I found these claims puzzling for a few different reasons.

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