2021/01/19 by Inga Abel, Abel, Inga, Helmut Graeb +1 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · #Design Education and Practice #FOS: Electrical engineering #Manufacturing Process and Optimization #Product Development and Customization #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2101.07517
openalex publication_date 2021/01/19 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper presents a method to automatically synthesize the structure of an operational amplifier. It is positioned between approaches with fixed design plans and a small search space of structures and approaches with generic structural production rules and a large search space with technically impractical structures. The presented approach develops a hierarchical composition graph based on functional blocks that spans a search space of thousands of technically meaningful structure variants for single-output, fully-differential and complementary operational amplifiers. The search algorithm is a combined heuristic and enumerative process. The evaluation is based on circuit sizing with a library of behavioral equations of functional blocks. Formalizing the knowledge of functional blocks in op-amps for structural synthesis and sizing inherently reduces the search space and lessens the number of created topologies not fulfilling the specifications. Experimental results for the three op-amp classes are presented. An outlook how this method can be extended to multi-stage op-amps is given.