The Master Thesis project of Ye Ding has been conducted in cooperation between Prof. Helmut Graeb of the Chair of Electronic Design Automation at TUM and Dr. Husni Habel of Infineon Technologies AG. The work has received the Cadence Academic Network Master Thesis Award during the CDNLive conference in Munich, May 6, 2019.

The thesis deals with capacitor place&route for successive-approximation-register analog-digital converters (SAR-ADCs). SAR-ADCs implement a binary search in the conversion process using arrays of capacitors of ratios corresponding to the bisectioning process. SAR-ADCs are of great importance in modern low-power applications and therefore of high industrial relevance.

A novel place&route methodology for capacitor arrays with generalized weighting was developed. The placement algorithm is hybrid and considers the tradeoff between capacitor dispersion and routability. The routing algorithm is starting from a constructive solution and iteratively adjusts it to minimize the main ADC performance features INL and DNL. More information can be found in the following IEEE journal paper that resulted from the thesis project: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8695813.