Speeding-Up Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuit Sizing with Neural Networks

In this book, innovative research using artificial neural networks (ANNs) is conducted to automate the sizing task of RF IC design, which is used in two different steps of the automatic design process. The advances in telecommunications, such as the 5th generation broadband or 5G for short, open doors to advances in areas such as health care, education, resource management, transportation, agriculture and many other areas. Consequently, there is high pressure in today’s market for significant communication rates, extensive bandwidths and ultralow-power consumption. This is where radiofrequency (RF) integrated circuits (ICs) come in hand, playing a crucial role. This demand stresses out the problem which resides in the remarkable difficulty of RF IC design in deep nanometric integration technologies due to their high complexity and stringent performances. Given the economic pressure for high quality yet cheap electronics and challenging time-to-market constraints, there is an urgent need for electronic design automation (EDA) tools to increase the RF designers’ productivity and improve the quality of resulting ICs. In the last years, the automatic sizing of RF IC blocks in deep nanometer technologies has moved toward process, voltage and temperature (PVT)-inclusive optimizations to ensure their robustness. Each sizing solution is exhaustively simulated in a set of PVT corners, thus pushing modern workstations’ capabilities to their limits.