Digital compatible synthesis, placement and implementation of mixed-signal time-domain computing

Mixed-signal time-domain computing (TC) has recently drawn significant attention due to its high efficiency in applications such as machine learning accelerators. However, due to the nature of analog and mixed-signal design, there is a lack of a systematic flow of synthesis and place & route for time-domain circuits. This paper proposed a comprehensive design flow for TC. In the front-end, a variation-aware digital compatible synthesis flow is proposed. In the back-end, a placement technique using graph-based optimization engine is proposed to deal with the especially stringent matching requirement in TC. Simulation results show significant improvement over the prior analog placement methods. A 55nm test chip is used to demonstrate that the proposed design flow can meet the stringent timing matching target for TC with significant performance boost over conventional digital design.