Article,

Automated Synthesis of Analog Electrical Circuits by Means of Genetic Programming

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IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 1 (2): 109--128 (July 1997)

Abstract

The design (synthesis) of analog electrical circuits starts with a high-level statement of the circuit's desired behavior and requires creating a circuit that satisfies the specified design goals. Analog circuit synthesis entails the creation of both the topology and the sizing (numerical values) of all of the circuit's components. The difficulty of the problem of analog circuit synthesis is well known and there is no previously known general automated technique for synthesizing an analog circuit from a high-level statement of the circuit's desired behavior. This paper presents a single uniform approach using genetic programming for the automatic synthesis of both the topology and sizing of a suite of eight different prototypical analog circuits, including a lowpass filter, a crossover (woofer and tweeter) filter, a source identification circuit, an amplifier, a computational circuit, a time-optimal controller circuit, a temperature-sensing circuit, and a voltage reference circuit. The problem-specific information required for each of the eight problems is minimal and consists primarily of the number of inputs and outputs of the desired circuit, the types of available components, and a fitness measure that restates the high-level statement of the circuit's desired behavior as a measurable mathematical quantity. The eight genetically evolved circuits constitute an instance of an evolutionary computation technique producing results on a task that is usually thought of as requiring human intelligence. The fact that a single uniform approach yielded a satisfactory design for each of the eight circuits as well as the fact that a satisfactory design was created on the first or second run of each problem are evidence for the general applicability of genetic programming for solving the problem of automatic synthesis of analog electrical circuits.

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