In integrated circuit design of advanced technology nodes, layout density uniformity significantly influences the manufacturability due to the CMP variability. In analog design, especially, designers are suffering from passing the density checking since there are few useful tools. To tackle this issue, we focus a transistor-array(TA)-style analog layout, and propose a density optimization algorithm consistent with complicated design rules. Based on TA-style, we introduce a density-aware layout format to explicitly control the layout pattern density, and provide the mathematical optimization approach. Hence, a design flow incorporating our density optimization can drastically reduce the design time with fewer iterations. In a design case of an OPAMP layout in a 65nm CMOS process, the result demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves more than 48× speed-up compared with conventional manual layout, meanwhile it shows a good circuit performance in the post-layout simulation.

Forecasting commodity futures price is a challenging task. We present an algorithm to predict the trend of commodity futures price based on a type of structuring data and back propagation neural network. The random volatility of futures can be filtered out in the structuring data. Moreover, it is not restricted by the type of futures contract. Experiments show the algorithm can achieve 80% accuracy in predicting price trends.