design of analog circuits using genetic algorithm

Hi friends,can anyone give me some insight about the design of analog circuits using genetic algorithm?

Reply to
ujjwal.electronics
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People, mostly academics, keep trying this. As far as I know, it doesn't work. Understanding electronics is still better than random fiddling; the solution spaces, first for a topology and then for values, is just too big.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

I believe you were the one telling us you're personally much more than just a giant genetic algorithm yourself though, right, John? :-)

I agree with you, although I will point out for the benefit of the O.P. that using optimizers (genetic algorithms or more traditional ones) to *tweak* component values once you have a decent toplogy and reasonably sane starting values is quite common and successful.

Reply to
Joel Koltner

I ran one of my BandGap designs thru one of those optimizers... killed it... FUBAR ;-)

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Somehow a few trillion neurons work better than a few thousand lines of code. Maybe some day computers will be better than people for circuit design, like they are now for chess. But chess has rules.

Have you done genetic optimization of circuit values? I guess you'd first have to come up with a scoring system that defines "best" (like, for a voltage regulator, something that includes line reg, load reg, tc, transient response, standard value parts, cost? Then wrap around that a simulator, then wrap around that the random value diddler and genetic selection stuff. I can see that diverging fast. Or rather, diverging slow. It's easy to get lost in a 17-dimensional space.

Even intelligent diddling and simulation, for something simple like a filter, can easily become a horror.

I sometines do brute-force numerical searches for things like crystal frequencies and divisors that satisfy some number of requirements. That's not so much genetic as just trying a bazillion possible values in some nested FOR loops.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Hi John,

Indirectly, yes... Microwave Office has a bunch of optimizers built-in, and one of them (the "Pointer Optimizer") rotates through a handful of other optimizers, including a genetic algorithm-based optimizer, in order to try to achieve better results than any single optimizer alone does. I've used it to tweak component values in filter designs; for microwave circuits it's also quite common to use these optimizers (ADS and Ansoft -- the other big uWave design packages -- have them as well) to tweak matching and biasing networks and geometries for distributed filters/couplers/etc. It's these "support" components that get tweaked... I haven't ever seen a design where, e.g., someone gave the optimizer a dozen transistors to pick from.

Yes... as long as the simulator can measure it, you can (attempt to) optimize it. For standard part values the usual approach is to make an array of the standard values available and then optimize on an index into that array. I've never worried about cost myself since usually all the, e.g., Coilcraft mini air-spring inductors have approximately the same price, but potentially you could have it take that into consideration as well.

Absolutely... that's why they give you so many different optimizers to play with. :-) (MWO has 14...) Divergence is actually pretty uncommon; far more often you just see stagnation while it sits and twiddles some component values a bit but the cost metric doesn't move around much.

Potentially, yes, but what else are you going to do (other than loosen your specs or, say, add more sections so you're not asking as much from each one... making your widget bigger and costlier)? Even at lower UHF frequencies there are usually significant differences between the ideal component values for a filter and what you actually have to use based on the parasitics of the PCB and the finite Q of the components. There are filter synthesis where you can specify exactly where you'd like your poles and zeroes and it'll synthesize a circuit for you, but again you eventually have to move to real components and it's pretty much intractable to try to directly synthesize a design taking into account all the warts seen with real inductors. (I am impressed at the work you see in some of the better filter design books where they take a first cut at analytically compensating for finite inductor Q by moving the poles around a bit, though.) Hence, you might as well get close with what you know and can estimate, then toss in the real component models, and let the optimizer take a whack at it.

(I'm thinking of relatively tight -- Q>20 -- bandpass filters here. Seems like that's what I'm always being asked for...)

Good global optimization is obviously a very difficult problem, but personally I'm amazed at times just how well these algorithms perform.

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com a écrit :

Keep meeting girls and making babies until one of them grow as a good analog designer.

That's the best method ever.

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Thanks,
Fred.
Reply to
Fred Bartoli

There are two steps: first optimize a function then implement a network. Do that trough the iterations.

Actually, converging, but very slow. Too many local optima.

17 dimensions is not much. Brute force optimization gets slow with 30+ dimensions.

It helps if you can give hints to the optimizer, so it will do the focused search instead of the random guessing.

Sure. The other typical application is the search for the best combination of the components of the standard values so the circuit would satisfy the specs.

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

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Reply to
Vladimir Vassilevsky

That's what I do for voltage dividers. We stock a certain subset of the E12 values. I have a program which tries all combinations of 2 and

3 resistors to find the closest match. (I started out trying to "optimise" the algorithm, then realised a brute force search would likely take less time than typing the name of the program).
--

John Devereux
Reply to
John Devereux

The problem can be considered an n-dimensional intersection problem iow?

Reply to
sky465nm

I think I mentioned a similar problem (other problem scope) for an math professor some time ago. And the answer I got is that there's is no solution other than simple brute force. Anyone recall the name of this type of problem ..?

Ofcourse if someone come up with a way to systematicly calculate this type of problem I will be interested. :)

Reply to
sky465nm

From:

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"The concept was pioneered by Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex, England, who in 1996 evolved a tone discriminator using fewer than 40 programmable logic gates and no clock signal in a FPGA. This is a remarkably small design for such a device and relied on exploiting peculiarities of the hardware that engineers normally avoid. For example, one group of gates has no logical connection to the rest of the circuit, yet is crucial to its function."

I love that last point! There's a whole universe of possibilities out there that is beyond the reach of engineering, which itself would never have come about had it not been for another type of evolved hardware, the wet stuff between our ears.

Also:

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Joe

Reply to
J.A. Legris

In message , John Larkin writes

And so does circuit design. Although the intuitive creative step to define the architecture is still well beyond modern computation optimising components in an existing architecture is now quite practicable even on a PC.

17 dimensions is no real challenge to modern optimisers.

No modern least squares (or 1-Norm) optimiser should ever diverge (that was true even a couple of decades ago). What tends to happen is that they get trapped in steep diagonal valleys or at local minima and never find the true global optimum.

Simplex isn't too bad if you already have some idea of how big a range of parameters you have to cover. Conjugate gradients will handle most difficult problems fairly well given a suitable starting point and something like simulated annealing is about as good as it gets for global optimisation irrespective of the initial starting point. Genetic algorithms are similar to the latter, but rely on an ensemble of simulations with parameters that are allowed to breed according to their success rating.

I reckon simulated annealing is easier to use than GA. YMMV.

It should not be if you know how the free parameters are inter related. Filter design is one case where diddling individual parameters in a 1-D optimal search strategy will almost never get you what you want. There a specialised codes around for optimal filter design.

There is probably a faster way to do that but if it is fast enough then fine.

Regards,

--
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

I wonder if the resulting "design" worked in another instance of the same FPGA>

Reply to
Paul Burke

Probably not. Maybe subsequent versions could evolve adaptive techniques to tweak themselves into the right state.

Did you know that young eyeballs grow to assume the correct focal length based on feedback from the retina? Evidently, reading in poor light when you're a kid is bad for you afterall. Low light =3D> wide open lens aperture and short depth of field @ high abberation =3D>

chronically poor close focus while reading =3D> eyeball attempts to correct by moving the focal plane further back =3D> permanent myopia.

-- Joe

Reply to
J.A. Legris

Sounds like Zebulum doesm't understand electronics design *or* evolution.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Most likely not. As I recall the "design" had a horrible TempCo and was completely unmanufacturable (i.e., yields would have been near-zero).

I guess that's what "basic research" is for, though... he didn't demonstrate anything that couldn't be done much better using traditional methods, but he's trying to make the argument that given enough more research maybe his approach would be a viable design technique.

Reply to
Joel Koltner

(snip)

But only because those variables were not included in the evolutionary environment. Evolution has no imagination to predict future constraints. But it can, in some cases, produce very robust designs, if the environment exposes the replicating "organisms" to a wide range of stresses, without wiping the "species" out. Evolution adapts "organisms" to the pressures they are exposed to, while the evolution is happening, or fails and the "species" goes extinct.

This is one reason that scientists are so worried about global thermal runaway. It is expected to produce new environmental conditions that will wipe out a large number of species that evolved in circumstances that are different from what is to come, and come too quickly for them to evolve the necessary changes. Similar low yields.

Only bacteria and insects evolve fast enough to take advantage of rapid changes in the environment. There is expected to be a bloom of new diseases taking advantage of the newly stressed food populations (humans, for example) that will speed many extinctions. We are non robust, much like those chips, if our environment changes rapidly. Especially the disease environment.

--
Regards,

John Popelish
Reply to
John Popelish

solution

The famously "unsolvable" (in optimal time, that is) puzzles are NP-complete.

With a set of resistors and rules for only one or a few in series at any given point, you could optimize the search by excluding indices that gives wrong values (why check ratios of 0.997 when you're looking for 0.431?) and binary-searching the lists (since sublists of the master list are always in order). Further optimization could be added by taking preferences, e.g., checking certain ratios of values that come up commonly (such as one resistor in series with a much smaller resistor (therefore selected from a much smaller set), adding to a value inbetween adjecent values).

Tim

-- Deep Fryer: A very philosophical monk. Website @

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Reply to
Tim Williams

Can you run dimbulb through it, too? He's already FUBAR.

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

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