DeMixGen: Deterministic mixed-signal layout generation with separated analog and digital signal paths

With shrinking process technology, decreasing supply voltage, and increasing clock frequency, noise reduction becomes more and more crucial to the success of modern mixed-signal system-on-chip design. To eliminate the switching noise due to crosstalk coupling between analog and digital signals, it is essential to fully separate the routing paths of analog and digital nets when generating mixed-signal layouts. Different from previous works which cannot fully separate analog and digital routing paths, this paper presents a novel hierarchical deterministic mixed-signal layout synthesis approach with the separation of analog and digital signal paths for switching noise elimination. Experimental results based on a third-order ΣΔ modulator show that the proposed approach can result in various layouts with separated analog and digital signal paths while achieving better signal-to-noise and distortion ratio, and overall performance specifications.