Bio-Inspired Circuit Sizing and Trimming Methods for Dynamically Reconfigurable Sensor Electronics in Industrial Embedded Systems


Abstract

Analog sensor electronics requires special care during design in order to increase the quality and precision of the signal, and the life time of the product. Nevertheless, it can experience static deviations due to the manufacturing tolerances, and dynamic deviations due to operating in non-ideal environment. Therefore, the advanced applications such as MEMS technology employs calibration loop to deal with the deviations, but unfortunately, it is considered only in the digital domain, which cannot cope with all the analog deviations such as saturation of the analog signal, etc. On the other hand, rapid-prototyping is essential to decrease the development time, and the cost of the products for small quantities. Recently, evolvable hardware has been developed with the motivation to cope with the mentioned sensor electronic problems. However the industrial specifications and requirements are not considered in the hardware learning loop. Indeed, it minimizes the error between the required output and the real output generated due to given test signal. The aim of this thesis is to synthesize the generic organic-computing sensor electronics and return hardware with predictable behavior for embedded system applications that gains the industrial acceptance; therefore, the hardware topology is constrained to the standard hardware topologies, the hardware standard specifications are included in the optimization, and hierarchical optimization are abstracted from the synthesis tools to evolve first the building blocks, then evolve the abstract level that employs these optimized blocks. On the other hand, measuring some of the industrial specifications needs expensive equipments and some others are time consuming which is not fortunate for embedded system applications. Therefore, the novel approach “mixtrinsic multi-objective optimization” is proposed that simulates/estimates the set of the specifications that is hard to be measured due to the cost or time requirements, while it measures intrinsically the set of the specifications that has high sensitivity to deviations. These approaches succeed to optimize the hardware to meet the industrial specifications with low cost measurement setup which is essential for embedded system applications.