Improving design feature reuse in analog circuit design through topological-symbolic comparison and design concept combination

This chapter presents a novel circuit synthesis flow based on concept comparison, combination, learning, and re-use. The discussion overviews a technique for systematically comparing two analog circuits. The comparison data presents the similar and distinguishing performance characteristics of two circuits with respect to DC-gain, bandwidth, common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR), noise, and sensitivity. The comparison data is important for getting insight about the common and unique benefits of a circuit, selecting fitting circuit topologies for system design, and circuit topology refinement and synthesis. The technique matches the topologies and nodal symbolic expressions of the compared circuits to find nodes with similar electric behavior. The impact on performance of the unmatched nodes is used to express the differentiating characteristics of the circuits. Experiments illustrate the comparison technique for a pair of analog circuits.