The design automation of analog circuits is a longstanding challenge in the integrated circuit field. This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning method to expedite the design of analog circuits at the pre-layout stage, where the goal is to find device parameters to fulfill desired circuit specifications. Our approach is inspired by experienced human designers who rely on domain knowledge of analog circuit design (e.g., circuit topology and couplings between circuit specifications) to tackle the problem. Unlike all prior methods, our method originally incorporates such key domain knowledge into policy learning with a graph-based policy network, thereby best modeling the relations between circuit parameters and design targets. Experimental results on exemplary circuits show it achieves human-level design accuracy (~99%) with 1.5x efficiency of existing best-performing methods. Our method also shows better generalization ability to unseen specifications and optimality in circuit performance optimization. Moreover, it applies to designing diverse analog circuits across different semiconductor technologies, breaking the limitations of prior ad-hoc methods in designing one particular type of analog circuits with conventional semiconductor technology.

本研究介绍了基于深度强化学习、图模型策略网络和模拟电路设计领域知识的自动设计方法，以加快模拟电路的设计。该方法在电路参数和设计目标之间建立关系，实现了99%的设计准确率和1.5倍的效率提升，并支持不同半导体技术的模拟电路设计。

基于领域知识的深度强化学习自动模拟电路设计