Title: Optimising an inductor circuit and a two-stage operational transconductance amplifier using evolutionary and classical algorithms

Authors: V. Cutello, G. Nicosia, R. Rascuna, S. Spinella

Addresses: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, V.le A. Doria 6, Catania 95125, Italy. ' Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, V.le A. Doria 6, Catania 95125, Italy. ' Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, V.le A. Doria 6, Catania 95125, Italy. ' Department of Linguistics, University of Calabria, Ponte P. Bucci cubo 17/b, Arcavacata di Rende 87036, Italy

Abstract: In this work, we compare evolutionary algorithms and standard optimisation methods on two circuit design problems: the parameter extraction of a device circuit model and the multiobjective optimisation of an operational transconductance amplifier. The comparison is made in terms of quality of the solutions and computational effort, that is, objective function evaluations needed to compute them. The experimental results obtained show that standard techniques are more robust than evolutionary algorithms, while the latter are more effective in terms of the standard metrics and function calls. In particular for the multiobjective problem, the observed Pareto front determined by evolutionary algorithms has a better spread of solutions with a larger number of non-dominated solutions when compared to the standard multiobjective techniques.

Keywords: evolutionary algorithms; classical optimisation methods; multiobjective optimisation; circuit design; inductor device circuits; operational transconductance amplifiers; nanoscale technology; nanotechnology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2006.012768

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2006 Vol.2 No.3/4, pp.158 - 169

Published online: 14 Mar 2007 *

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