Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin published “APPlace: Co-Optimizing Device Locations and Access Points for Routing-Aware Analog Placement.”

Abstract
“Analog layout automation remains challenging in Analog/Mixed-Signal circuit design, because parasitics and mismatches introduced during layout strongly affect circuit performance. Placement is especially critical among the layout stages, as it constrains the routing solution space and the achievable post-layout performance. Existing analytical placement methods optimize device coordinates under center-based wirelength proxies and leave access point (AP) selection to routing. In analog circuits, however, a routing pin is an extended piece of terminal metal rather than a fixed point, and the best AP on it depends on where the other connected devices are placed, so a coordinate-only placement optimizes for connection points that the router will not use. We present APPlace, a routing-aware analog placement framework that co-optimizes device locations and AP selections during global placement, followed by a legalization stage that preserves the structure established by global placement. Experimental results on four real-world analog benchmarks show that APPlace achieves better overall post-layout performance than representative baselines at comparable layout area. Ablation studies further show that removing AP co-optimization causes up to a 13 dB CMRR loss among the OTA benchmarks and a 23% increase in comparator delay.”

Liu, Bingyang, Xiaohan Gao, Souradip Poddar, and David Z. Pan. “APPlace: Co-Optimizing Device Locations and Access Points for Routing-Aware Analog Placement.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.39515 (2026). License: Attribution 4.0 International.

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