Structure diversity design of analog circuits by evolutionary computation for fault-tolerance

Fault-tolerance is an essential factor of analog circuit design. Especially in extreme environment, faults would be uncertain, time-variant and unpredictable. It is significant to design fault-tolerant analog circuit robust to unknown faults. Using multiple circuit ensembles is an effective fault-tolerance technology based on space redundancy. In the design of multiple circuit ensembles robust to unknown faults, the key issue is generating sub-circuits with different structure. Therefore in this paper, our emphasis is on researches about structure diversity design of analog circuits. We make analysis on a structure convergence problem in open-ended analog circuit design and proposed a novel evolution design model. On the other hand, we add structure space crowding factor and genotype similarity penalty into fitness function for improving population diversity. Experiments on low-pass filters show that circuits with different structure are generated and, in a certain extent, structure diversity of the population has been improved.