Negatively-correlated redundancy circuits evolution: A novel way of robust analog circuit synthesizing

Abstract

Integrated circuit technology has been dramatically developed during the past decades. Reliability of analog circuits becomes more and more important for yield design. However, most state of the art researches are concentrated on analog circuit robust optimization and analog circuit fault detection. There are seldom any researches on analog circuit fault-tolerant design. This paper proposed an negatively-correlated evolution strategy to design fault-tolerant analog circuits. In the proposed strategy, the fault-tolerant circuit can be considered as an ensemble system. The system contains several child circuits. negatively-correlated evolution strategy automatically synthesizes these child circuits, and make sure the errors of each child circuits are negatively correlated to each other. The experimental result shows that, in most circumstances, the circuit with negative correlation redundancy has the best fault tolerant performance compared with the circuit with randomly generated redundancy. The the circuit with duplicated redundancy didn't has much improvement compared with single circuit. So, the proposed strategy is a beneficial idea towards robust and fault tolerant analog circuit design.