Gaspad: a general and efficient mm-wave integrated circuit synthesis method based on surrogate model assisted evolutionary algorithm

Liu, B. , Zhao, D., Reynaert, P. and Gielen, G. G.E. (2014) Gaspad: a general and efficient mm-wave integrated circuit synthesis method based on surrogate model assisted evolutionary algorithm. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 33(2), pp. 169-182. (doi: 10.1109/TCAD.2013.2284109)

Abstract

The design and optimization (both sizing and layout) of mm-wave integrated circuits (ICs) have attracted much attention due to the growing demand in industry. However, available manual design and synthesis methods suffer from a high dependence on design experience, being inefficient or not general enough. To address this problem, a new method, called general mm-wave IC synthesis based on Gaussian process model assisted differential evolution (GASPAD), is proposed in this paper. A medium-scale computationally expensive constrained optimization problem must be solved for the targeted mm-wave IC design problem. Besides the basic techniques of using a global optimization algorithm to obtain highly optimized design solutions and using surrogate models to obtain a high efficiency, a surrogate model-aware search mechanism (SMAS) for tackling the several tens of design variables (medium scale) and a method to appropriately integrate constraint handling techniques into SMAS for tackling the multiple (high-) performance specifications are proposed. Experiments on two 60 GHz power amplifiers in a 65 nm CMOS technology and two mathematical benchmark problems are carried out. Comparisons with the state-of-art provide evidence of the important advantages of GASPAD in terms of solution quality and efficiency.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Liu, Dr Bo
• Authors: Liu, B., Zhao, D., Reynaert, P., and Gielen, G. G.E.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Engineering
• Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
• Publisher: IEEE
• ISSN: 0278-0070
• ISSN (Online): 1937-4151
• Published Online: 16 January 2014