Long design cycles due to the inability to predictsilicon realities is a well-known problem thatplagues analog/RF integrated circuit productdevelopment. As this problem worsens for nanoscaleIC technologies, the high cost of design andmultiple manufacturing spins causes fewer productsto have the volume required to support full customimplementation. We propose a regular analog/RF ICusing metal-mask configurability design methodologyORACLE, which is a combination of reuse and shared-use by formulating the synthesis problem as anoptimization with recourse problem. Using a two-stage geometric programming with recourse approach,ORACLE solves for both the globally optimal sharedand application-specific variables. Furthermore,robust optimization is proposed to treat the designwith variability issue, further enhancing theORACLE methodology by providing yield bound for eachconfiguration of regular designs.
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