Invited: Novel Concepts to Improve Custom Layout Automation Capabilities

Custom layout remains predominant in the design of today's Analog, mmW/RF, MEMS, Power MOSFET, Silicon Photonics, Advanced Package, and other non-digital integrated circuits. Automation in these domains is often impeded by inherent design complexity, uncertainty due to missing information, limited compatibility and capability, and established design paradigms. This paper provides novel perspectives and interdependent concepts to address several long-standing custom automation challenges. We identify partitioning, abstraction, reification, epistemic uncertainty, and dialectic motion as theoretical foundations to improve custom layout automation. Furthermore, we derive and detail generic, automation-enhancing elementary and practical application concepts, including design context consideration, mixins, reactivity, and representation. We demonstrate these improved automation capabilities through various application examples.