Danial Noori Zadeh, Mohamed B. Elamiencs.AI cs.AR eess.SP
Sharing analog integrated circuit designs remains difficult: foundry non-disclosure agreements restrict the process details a design depends on, and the testbenches behind published results are rarely released. We present analog-db, an open-source, versioned database built on a shareable design representation. A domain-specific language captures each design as a process-neutral topology, reusable testbenches, and a machine-readable datasheet under one schema, so a design is shared in full and re-simulates on the process kits it is bound to. A parameterization scheme exposes functional sub-blocks and device sizes as named parameters that carry their matching constraints, making circuits composable and retargetable; a schema-governed contract and queryable catalog let AI design agents discover and reuse them directly. Across the regulator corpus, all 23 circuit-kit bindings on three open kits meet their own recorded specification bands (typical corner, matched devices, no layout) and 10 of 23 meet a common class band. Seventeen of the 23 imported sizings failed their testbenches and closed under a gm/ID sizing loop driven by the annotated sub-block roles, typically within one to three iterations. In a supervised case study, a coding agent working from the released artifacts sized the op-amp cores of a chopper instrumentation amplifier on an open 130nm kit, locating four hand-entry defects and a missing common-mode feedback loop that the sizing-only baseline did not repair. The database holds 68 circuits across sixteen classes, verifiable at schematic level under a tiered harness and tracked on a power/performance scoreboard, released at https://github.com/MacAnalog/spicexplorer-release.
Mohammed Ayman Habib, Rylan Hart, Morteza Fayazieess.SY cs.AI
Analog circuit design is a time-consuming, iterative process in a nonlinear and high-dimensional design space that relies heavily on expert intuition. Among recent developments, LLMs have introduced a promising approach by bringing natural language reasoning to circuit design tasks. The majority of conventional LLM-based approaches provide fragmented solutions that focus either only on sizing or topology generation. These methods require adding specific technical knowledge manually, which is inefficient and prone to hallucinations during circuit sizing. Moreover, the inherent trade-off in meeting different specs makes current approaches iterative and tedious. Another shortcoming is the inability to create innovative topologies, which may lead to sub-optimal designs due to reliance on conventional topologies. In this paper, we present AaLLM, an open-source end-to-end multi-agent LLM workflow that takes user specs as input and outputs the appropriate netlist, encompassing both topology generation and circuit sizing. AaLLM automates the creation of a relevant knowledge base from research papers and textbooks to combat tedious manual data collection. A RAG model is implemented to emulate circuit design expertise using this knowledge base. Moreover, AaLLM uses a novel tri-agent feedback system comprising a Designer that determines circuit component values, a Critic that scrutinizes these values, and an Evaluator that minimizes circuit sizing iterations by arbitrating between the other two agents. AaLLM-generated novel topologies achieve a figure of merit (FoM) comparable to that of known topologies, and up to 3x higher for certain circuits. Testing on several circuit topologies, our results show a 3x - 4.5x decrease in the number of SPICE calls at inference when compared to SOTA multi-agent LLM pipelines. The results also show a 40x decrease in wall-clock time compared to existing approaches.
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a sample-efficient framework for analog circuit topology search, where evaluating each candidate topology can require costly simulation. However, representation-based BO methods typically treat circuit embeddings as fixed after encoder training. This creates a mismatch between representation learning and optimization: embeddings learned to encode or reconstruct circuit structure are not necessarily organized according to the figure of merit (FoM) being optimized. This paper introduces Test-Time Analog Representation Adaptation for Bayesian Optimization (TTARO), an online deep-kernel BO framework that adapts circuit representations throughout the search process. Starting from pretrained circuit embeddings, TTARO jointly learns a nonlinear feature transformation and a Gaussian-process surrogate using the FoM labels of the circuits evaluated so far. Following each new evaluation, TTARO updates the representation and surrogate before selecting the next candidate. We compare TTARO with conventional Gaussian Process-based BO over fixed embeddings and with Deep Kernel Learning (DKL), which learns the representation only from the initial evaluated designs and keeps it fixed throughout the remainder of the search. By continually incorporating newly observed FoM labels into representation learning, TTARO aligns the search space with the optimization objective as BO progresses. In our experiments, TTARO reduces regret AUC by 15.2% on average relative to BO and by 20.7% relative to DKL across 40 encoder/kernel/acquisition settings, outperforming prior art in most settings with reductions as large as 46.7%.
Osei Brempong, Mohammed Ayman Habib, Vivan Poddar +1eess.SY cs.AI
Analog circuit design automation using reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for reducing manual effort. However, many existing RL-based methods focus on single-objective optimization. Even methods designed for multi-objective (MO) problems often reduce multiple design specifications to a single scalar reward. This simplification limits the ability to capture the true Pareto trade-off among competing objectives and often leads to suboptimal designs. Moreover, requiring the model to be retrained from scratch whenever the desired MO specifications change remains a key limitation. To address these challenges, we present ORACLE, an open-source RL-based framework for MO analog circuit design optimization that replaces scalar reward optimization with vector-valued learning and preference-aware conditioning. ORACLE represents a true MO analog circuit design optimizer that uses a preference vector to specify the relative weights of multiple objectives, enabling a single trained model to generate designs across diverse trade-off settings without retraining. We further propose two preference-guidance strategies, namely normalized-weight guidance and cosine-aligned guidance, to improve convergence. In addition, we incorporate a large language model (LLM)-guided action selection mechanism to filter actions that are likely to lead to suboptimal designs or increased runtime. Our results show that, on multiple circuit topologies with 2,000 test cases, ORACLE reduces runtime by 20.4x - 104.4x compared to state-of-the-art approaches. It also meets 99.9% of the 2,000 target specifications, and achieves 5.1x - 318.6x better figure of merit in the resulting output specs.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capability in software code generation, their application to analog Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is bottlenecked. Owing to limited circuit topology understanding and data, directly prompting LLMs and multimodal models leads to hallucinations and failure to produce schematics capable of passing rigorous SPICE simulations, as we show in our work. Instead, we propose an end-to-end, multi-step LLM agentic framework ATLAS, capable of generating a functional Successive Approximation Register (SAR) Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) that successfully passes simulation validation. To adhere to the rigid constraints of analog design, we utilize expert knowledge to ground the LLM in its planning, selection, parameterization, and iterative modification. As part of ATLAS, we introduce Template-Constrained Generation - which unlike other template-based works - builds towards a more generalized SAR ADC generation flow. We demonstrate a strong proof-of-concept of our framework by developing SAR ADCs across technology nodes and input specs. Overall, our expert-knowledge grounded multi-step agentic ATLAS establishes a pragmatic foundation for integrating LLMs into reliable analog design methodologies.
Automating analog circuit topology design is essential to reduce the extensive manual effort required to meet increasingly diverse and customized application demands. Recent advances have applied sequence-to-sequence fine-tuning on pretrained language models to directly generate circuit topologies from user specifications in a single pass. However, these one-shot generation methods failed to generate complex circuits due to their exponentially growing search spaces and limited training datasets. In this paper, we present EXPLORE, a search-enhanced framework that integrates simulator-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with transformer-based decoding to enable test-time scaling for analog topology generation. By leveraging language-model priors and bypassing high-confidence structural tokens, EXPLORE allocates expensive simulator budget primarily toward topology-altering decisions during search. On a 6-component benchmark at a tight tolerance of 0.01, EXPLORE raises the success rate from 12% for one-shot generation and 33% for a sampling-and-filter baseline to 65%, and lowers MSE by over 20% relative to sampling-and-filter under the same search budget. These results establish EXPLORE as the first framework to integrate structured test-time search with LM decoding for analog topology generation, and a practical step toward scaling LLM-driven design automation.
Traditional design of analog circuits heavily relies on manual interventions across topology, sizing, and layout, with prior automation addressing stages in isolation. In this work, we propose PANDA, an LLM-enhanced framework that bridges high-level design intent to final layout by actively managing cross-stage dependencies through guided topology synthesis, substructure-aware sizing, and constraint-driven layout generation. This shifts automation from algorithm-centric execution to intent-centric co-design, reducing turnaround time from days or weeks to hours while improving design performance.