Evolutionary Design of Analog Electrical Circuits Using Genetic Programming

The design (synthesis) of analog electrical circuits entails the creation of both the topology and sizing (numerical values) of all of the circuit’s components. There has previously been no general automated technique for automatically designing an analog electrical circuit from a high-level statement of the circuit’s desired behavior. This paper shows how genetic programming can be used to automate the design of both the topology and sizing of a suite of five prototypical analog circuits, including a lowpass filter, a tri-state frequency discriminator circuit, a 60 dB amplifier, a computational circuit for the square root, and a time-optimal robot controller circuit. All five of these genetically evolved circuits constitute instances of an evolutionary computation technique solving a problem that is usually thought to require human intelligence.