Tutorial and Perspectives on MAGICAL: A Silicon-Proven Open-Source Analog IC Layout System
Keren Zhu, Hao Chen, Mingjie Liu, David Z. Pan
Abstract
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 xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <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.