CktGen: Automated Analog Circuit Design with Generative Artificial Intelligence

TL;DR

CktGen is a novel generative AI model that automates analog circuit design by conditioning on specifications, effectively capturing multiple valid designs and outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

We introduce CktGen, a variational autoencoder that encodes specifications and circuits separately, aligning their latent spaces for improved analog circuit generation.

Findings

CktGen outperforms state-of-the-art methods on open circuit benchmarks.

The model effectively captures multiple valid circuit designs per specification.

Contrastive training enhances the diversity and accuracy of generated circuits.

Abstract

The automatic synthesis of analog circuits presents significant challenges. Most existing approaches formulate the problem as a single-objective optimization task, overlooking that design specifications for a given circuit type vary widely across applications. To address this, we introduce specification-conditioned analog circuit generation, a task that directly generates analog circuits based on target specifications. The motivation is to leverage existing well-designed circuits to improve automation in analog circuit design. Specifically, we propose CktGen, a simple yet effective variational autoencoder that maps discretized specifications and circuits into a joint latent space and reconstructs the circuit from that latent vector. Notably, as a single specification may correspond to multiple valid circuits, naively fusing specification information into the generative model does not capture these one-to-many relationships. To address this, we decouple the encoding of circuits and specifications and align their mapped latent space. Then, we employ contrastive training with a filter mask to maximize differences between encoded circuits and specifications. Furthermore, classifier guidance along with latent feature alignment promotes the clustering of circuits sharing the same specification, avoiding model collapse into trivial one-to-one mappings. By canonicalizing the latent space with respect to specifications, we can search for an optimal circuit that meets valid target specifications. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the open circuit benchmark and introduce metrics to evaluate cross-model consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that CktGen achieves substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods.