Introduction

Abstract

In the last years, the proliferation of consumer electronic devices triggered a huge increase in microelectronic activities, enabling the growth of integrated circuits (ICs) market from $10 billion in 1980 to over than $340 billion in 2015, with the analog market growing 10.6% in 2014, 0.7 points over the overall market growth, and expected to follow in 2015 (“World Semiconductor Trade Statistics,” https://www.wsts.org/). Due to the developments made in the last decades in very large scale integration technologies, designers have the means to build extremely complex multimillion transistor ICs that implement complete systems in a single chip, i.e., analog or mixed-signal components, digital processors and memory blocks. The need of new functionalities, smaller devices, more power efficiency, less production and integration costs, and less design cost makes the design of electronic systems a truly challenging task, which must be completed within strict time-to-market constraints. The accomplishment of this complex task is only possible since designers are assisted by computer-aided design tools that support the whole design process. To introduce the mixed-signal design paradigm, this Chapter starts with a brief introduction to the area of analog IC design, with special emphasis to layout generation. First, a well-accepted design flow for analog ICs is presented, and then, the features and advances to the state-of-the-art of the proposed automatic layout generation tool are outlined.