DiffCkt: A Diffusion Model-Based Hybrid Neural Network Framework for Automatic Transistor-Level Generation of Analog Circuits

TL;DR

This paper introduces DiffCkt, a diffusion model-based framework that automates the transistor-level generation of analog circuits, significantly improving design efficiency and achieving state-of-the-art results in circuit generation quality.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel diffusion model approach for automatic analog circuit generation, enabling direct structure and parameter synthesis tailored to performance needs.

Findings

DiffCkt improves the Circuit Generation Efficiency Index (CGEI) by up to 8365 times.

DiffCkt achieves state-of-the-art performance in analog circuit generation.

The framework effectively learns and generates circuit structures and device parameters.

Abstract

Analog circuit design consists of the pre-layout and layout phases. Among them, the pre-layout phase directly decides the final circuit performance, but heavily depends on experienced engineers to do manual design according to specific application scenarios. To overcome these challenges and automate the analog circuit pre-layout design phase, we introduce DiffCkt: a diffusion model-based hybrid neural network framework for the automatic transistor-level generation of analog circuits, which can directly generate corresponding circuit structures and device parameters tailored to specific performance requirements. To more accurately quantify the efficiency of circuits generated by DiffCkt, we introduce the Circuit Generation Efficiency Index (CGEI), which is determined by both the figure of merit (FOM) of a single generated circuit and the time consumed. Compared with relative research, DiffCkt has improved CGEI by a factor of $2.21 \sim 8365\times$, reaching a state-of-the-art (SOTA) level. In conclusion, this work shows that the diffusion model has the remarkable ability to learn and generate analog circuit structures and device parameters, providing a revolutionary method for automating the pre-layout design of analog circuits. The circuit dataset will be open source, its preview version is available at https://github.com/CjLiu-NJU/DiffCkt.