Parallel optimization of transistor level circuits using cartesian genetic programming
Vojtěch Mrázek, Zdeněk Vašíček · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion · 2017
The aim of the paper is to introduce a new parallel approach to evolutionary optimization of digital circuits described on transistor level. The evolutionary optimization is guided by the fitness function employing a simulator of candidate circuits. A new discrete simulator was introduced to achieve a good trade-off between precision and cost of circuit evaluations. The simulator is based on event-driven simulation. Precise numeric SPICE simulator is regularly called to validate simulation results. To increase the speed of evolution, three parallel approaches were proposed: (i) thread level parallelism, (ii) multiple computing nodes which collectively communicate and distribute the best solution, and (iii) client-server architecture eliminating a limited count of SPICE simulator instances.