Title: Swarm intelligence: making differences in analogue circuits structure for fault-tolerance

Authors: Huan Chang; Jingsong He

Addresses: Department of Electronic Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China ' Department of Electronic Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China

Abstract: Although digital technology has formed the mainstream instead of analogue, analogue circuits are still vital parts in modern electronic systems. Fault-tolerance performance is an essential factor of analogue circuit design. Especially in extreme environments, faults would be uncertain, time-variant and unpredictable. Fault-tolerance design of analogue circuits under uncertain faults is challenging and complex. Structure diversity design of analogue circuits is promising to be beneficial for solving the fault-tolerance design problems. In this paper, we make researches on the open-ended analogue circuit design with differences in structures by using swarm intelligence. We also improved a variable-length strategy and renewal strategies in PSO according to analogue circuit design. The experimental results on the design of low-pass filters confirm that PSO is able to design rich analogue circuits with diversity in structures. Furthermore, the diverse structures of analogue circuits are profitable for fault-tolerance.

Keywords: analogue circuit design; fault tolerance; robustness; uncertainty; PSO; particle swarm optimisation; evolvable hardware; swarm intelligence; computer application; analogue circuits.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2013.052797

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2013 Vol.46 No.3, pp.210 - 219

Published online: 29 May 2013 *

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