Derivation of Power System Module Metamodels for Early Shipboard Design Explorations

The U.S. Navy is currently challenged to develop new ship designs under compressed schedules. These ship designs must necessarily incorporate emerging technologies for high power energy conversion in order to enable smaller ship designs with a high degree of electrification and next generation electrified weapons. One way this challenge is being addressed is through development of collaborative concurrent design environment that allows for design space exploration across a wide range of implementation options. The most significant challenge is assurance of a dependable power and energy service via the shipboard Integrated Power and Energy System (IPES). The IPES is largely made up of interconnected power conversion and distribution equipment with allocated functionalities in order to meet demanding Quality of Power, Quality of Service and Survivability requirements. Feasible IPES implementations must fit within the ship hull constraints and must not violate limitations on ship displacement. This Thesis applies the theory of dependability to the use of scalable metamodels for power conversion and distribution equipment within a collaborative concurrent design environment to enable total ship set-based design outcomes that result implementable design specifications for procurement of equipment to be used in the final ship implementation

Design space exploration of RF-circuit blocks

ii iii Acknowledgments This thesis was written in the framework of an internship at NXP Semiconductors. It describes the results of a six months master project. I was supervised by Prof. Dr. W.H.A. Schilders of NXP Semiconductors and the Technical University Eindhoven and furthermore, by Dr. ir. J. A. Croon of NXP Semiconductors. Herewith, I want to express my deep gratitude to Prof. Schilders, who has guided me during the project and for proofreading of the thesis. Furthermore, I want to thank Dr. Croon sincerely for the helpful discussions, for the detailed corrections of the thesis and furthermore for the interesting introduction to semiconductor device modeling. Additionally, I want to thank Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. H. Gfrerer of the Johannes Kepler University Linz for reviewing this work and for his useful suggestions during the project. iv vContent

Automatic design of analogue circuits

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Evolvable Hardware (EHW) is a promising area in electronics today. Evolutionary Algorithms (EA), together with a circuit simulation tool or real hardware, automatically designs a circuit for a given problem. The circuits evolved may have unconventional designs and be less dependent on the personal knowledge of a designer. Nowadays, EA are represented by Genetic Algorithms (GA), Genetic Programming (GP) and Evolutionary Strategy (ES). While GA is definitely the most popular tool, GP has rapidly developed in recent years and is notable by its outstanding results. However, to date the use of ES for analogue circuit synthesis has been limited to a few applications. This work is devoted to exploring the potential of ES to create novel analogue designs. The narrative of the thesis starts with a framework of an ES-based system generating simple circuits, such as low pass filters. Then it continues with a step-by-step progression to increasingly sophisticated designs that require additional strength from the system. Finally, it describes the modernization of the system using novel techniques that enable the synthesis of complex multi-pin circuits that are newly evolved. It has been discovered that ES has strong power to synthesize analogue circuits. The circuits evolved in the first part of the thesis exceed similar results made previously using other techniques in a component economy, in the better functioning of the evolved circuits and in the computing power spent to reach the results. The target circuits for evolution in the second half are chosen by the author to challenge the capability of the developed system. By functioning, they do not belong to the conventional analogue domain but to applications that are usually adopted by digital circuits. To solve the design tasks, the system has been gradually developed to support the ability of evolving increasingly complex circuits. As a final result, a state-of-the-art ES-based system has been developed that possesses a novel mutation paradigm, with an ability to create, store and reuse substructures, to adapt the mutation, selection parameters and population size, utilize automatic incremental evolution and use the power of parallel computing. It has been discovered that with the ability to synthesis the most up-to-date multi-pin complex analogue circuits that have ever been automatically synthesized before, the system is capable of synthesizing circuits that are problematic for conventional design with application domains that lay beyond the conventional application domain for analogue circuits