HFORD: Hybrid Forward Optimization and Reverse Design Method and Its Applications to On-Chip Millimeter-Wave Inductive Elements
For IC designers of mmWave circuits, HFORD accelerates the slow, iterative synthesis of inductive elements, a key bottleneck in layout generation.
The paper proposes HFORD, a hybrid method for synthesizing on-chip millimeter-wave inductive elements from target specifications to layout, reducing design cycle time from hours to minutes.
On-chip inductive elements are pivotal in determining both the silicon footprint and performance of millimeter-wave (mmWave) integrated circuits. However, the layout-level synthesis of these passive devices is severely challenged by highly nonlinear geometry-to-performance mappings, computationally expensive full-wave electromagnetic simulations, topology-dependent design spaces, and the inherent non-uniqueness of inverse design. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose a hybrid forward optimization and reverse design (HFORD) method for the target-to-layout synthesis of mmWave inductive elements. Utilizing a unified core to map device-level requirements to layout-level seeds, HFORD structures direct device targets and translates circuit specifications into a hierarchical synthesis flow. Specifically, sparse-fitting sampling is introduced to improve coverage across critical performance regions, while compact response-fitting coefficients significantly reduce training dimensionality. The HFORD core integrates a random forest for topology selection, a variational autoencoder for spectral feature generation, a mixture density network for probabilistic inverse mapping, and particle swarm optimization for latent space exploration. This integration improves the feasibility of the generated layout seeds under design rule check (DRC) constraints. Two design examples demonstrate that the proposed method accelerates the design cycle from hours to minutes compared to conventional optimization methods.