Paving the Way for the Electronic Design Automation of Power Management Units.

The inclusion of automation mechanisms in the intricate design of power management units (PMUs) is long pursued in industry. This paper carries a discussion on the research lines required to implement a tool that automatically produces, from the system-level until the ready-for-tape-out layout, complex PMUs when given a set of specifications. In that flow, at the IP level, simulation-based techniques are seen as a valuable solution to pursue optimal sizing and layout, and thus, for one of the charge pumps (CPs) required in the PMU, an academic tool is applied to determine the tradeoffs between performance and the, severely constrained, layout area. In the last step, a worst-case corner (WCC) optimization on a 45- and 99-dimensional design and performance spaces, respectively, derived from 9 time-consuming transient analysis of each candidate solution, provided a thorough analysis between worst-case efficiency, output resistance, and rise and fall times, impossible to perform in the manual design. The obtained insights on the design space will be used to speed-up the process of devising a solution for tape-out.