Trustworthy structural synthesis and expert knowledge extraction with application to analog circuit design

Abstract

A system and method that does trustworthy multi-objective structural synthesis of analog circuits, and extracts expert analog circuit knowledge from the resulting tradeoffs. The system defines a space of thousands of possible topologies via a hierarchically organized combination of designer-trusted analog building blocks, the resulting topologies are guaranteed trustworthy. The system can perform a search based on a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm that uses an age-layered population structure to balance exploration vs. exploitation, with operators that make the search space a hybrid between vector-based and tree-based representations. A scheme employing average ranking on Pareto fronts is used to handle a high number of objectives. Good initial topology sizings are quickly generated via multi-gate constraint satisfaction. To explicitly capture expert analog design knowledge, data mining is employed on the sized circuits to: automatically generate a decision tree for navigating from performance specifications to topology choice, to do global nonlinear sensitivity analysis, and to generate analytical models of performance tradeoffs.