论文标题
基于差分进化和贝叶斯推断的多目标优化的自动电路尺寸
Automated Circuit Sizing with Multi-objective Optimization based on Differential Evolution and Bayesian Inference
论文作者
论文摘要
随着规格的越来越复杂,模拟电路的手动尺寸最近变得非常具有挑战性。特别是对于创新的大型电路设计,具有数十个设计变量,操作条件和要优化的目标相互矛盾的目标,设计工程师花了数周时间花费数周,运行了耗时的模拟,以寻找正确的配置。近年来,机器学习和优化技术为模拟电路设计领域带来了进化算法和贝叶斯模型,显示出良好的电路尺寸效果。在这种情况下,我们介绍了一种基于广义差分进化3(GDE3)和高斯过程(GPS)的设计优化方法。所提出的方法能够为具有大量设计变量的复杂电路和许多需要优化的相互冲突的目标执行尺寸。虽然最新的方法将多目标问题降低到单目标优化并可能引起先前的偏见,但我们使用帕累托优势直接搜索多目标空间,并确保向设计师提供各种解决方案。据我们所知,提出的方法是第一个专门解决解决方案的多样性的方法,同时还将重点放在最小化可行配置所需的模拟数量上。我们评估了两个电压调节器的引入方法,显示出不同水平的复杂性,我们强调,提出的创新候选候选方法和生存政策导致获得可行的解决方案,具有高度的多样性,比GDE3或基于贝叶斯优化的算法快得多。
With the ever increasing complexity of specifications, manual sizing for analog circuits recently became very challenging. Especially for innovative, large-scale circuits designs, with tens of design variables, operating conditions and conflicting objectives to be optimized, design engineers spend many weeks, running time-consuming simulations, in their attempt at finding the right configuration. Recent years brought machine learning and optimization techniques to the field of analog circuits design, with evolutionary algorithms and Bayesian models showing good results for circuit sizing. In this context, we introduce a design optimization method based on Generalized Differential Evolution 3 (GDE3) and Gaussian Processes (GPs). The proposed method is able to perform sizing for complex circuits with a large number of design variables and many conflicting objectives to be optimized. While state-of-the-art methods reduce multi-objective problems to single-objective optimization and potentially induce a prior bias, we search directly over the multi-objective space using Pareto dominance and ensure that diverse solutions are provided to the designers to choose from. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first to specifically address the diversity of the solutions, while also focusing on minimizing the number of simulations required to reach feasible configurations. We evaluate the introduced method on two voltage regulators showing different levels of complexity and we highlight that the proposed innovative candidate selection method and survival policy leads to obtaining feasible solutions, with a high degree of diversity, much faster than with GDE3 or Bayesian Optimization-based algorithms.