Evolving High-Speed, Energy-Efficient Integrated Circuits

Abstract — State-of-the-art technologies in very large scale integration (VLSI) aim at the realization of fast but low-power consuming circuits. Recent technological advents offer a design parameter with which both the processing speed and power consumption of every single gate, which is the basic building block of any circuit, can be fine tuned. With respect to this design parameter, a VLSI design constitutes a multi-dimensional multimodal optimization problem, for which previous research has already developed some problem-specific optimization procedures. But since they yield results worse than engineers, this paper investigates how genetic algorithms perform in this application domain. It turns out that in comparison to the procedures mentioned above, genetic algorithms are able to reduce the power consumption by about 10-40 %. These achievments are practically relevant, since they extend the circuits ’ times-ofoperation by the same amount. In addition, this paper also considers some problem-specific variations, which significantly speed up the optimization process. I