This book targets custom IC designers who are encountering variation issues in their designs, especially for modern process nodes at 45nm and below, such as statistical process variations, environmental variations, and layout effects. It teaches them the state-of-the-art in Variation-Aware Design tools, which help the designer to analyze quickly the variation effects, identify the problems, and fix the problems. Furthermore, this book describes the algorithms and algorithm behavior/performance/limitations, which is of use to designers considering these tools, designers using these tools, CAD researchers, and CAD managers.

This book targets custom IC designers who are encountering variation issues in their designs, especially for modern process nodes at 45nm and below, such as statistical process variations, environmental variations, and layout effects. It teaches them the state-of-the-art in Variation-Aware Design tools, which help the designer to analyze quickly the variation effects, identify the problems, and fix the problems. Furthermore, this book describes the algorithms and algorithm behavior/performance/limitations, which is of use to designers considering these tools, designers using these tools, CAD researchers, and CAD managers.

Genetic Programming Theory and Practice VII presents the results of the annual Genetic Programming Theory and Practice Workshop, contributed by the foremost international researchers and practitioners in the GP arena. Contributions examine the similarities and differences between theoretical and empirical results on real-world problems, and explore the synergy between theory and practice, producing a comprehensive view of the state of the art in GP application. Application areas include chemical process control, circuit design, financial data mining and bio-informatics, to name a few. About this book: Discusses the hurdles encountered when solving large-scale, cutting-edge applications, provides in-depth presentations of the latest and most significant applications of GP and the most recent theoretical results with direct applicability to state-of-the-art problems. Genetic Programming Theory and Practice VII is suitable for researchers, practitioners and students of Genetic Programming, including industry technical staffs, technical consultants and business entrepreneurs.

This book describes new tools for front end analog designers, starting with global variation-aware sizing, and extending to novel variation-aware topology design. The tools aid design through automation, but more importantly, they also aid designer insight through automation. We now describe four design tasks, each more general than the previous, and how this book contributes design aids and insight aids to each. The ?rst designer task targeted is global robust sizing. This task is supported by a design tool that does automated, globally reliable, variation-aware s- ing (SANGRIA), and an insight-aiding tool that extracts designer-interpretable whitebox models that relate sizings to circuit performance (CAFFEINE). SANGRIA searches on several levels of problem dif?culty simultaneously, from lower cheap-to-evaluate "exploration" layers to higher full-evaluation "exploitation" layers (structural homotopy). SANGRIAmakes maximal use of circuit simulations by performing scalable data mining on simulation results to choose new candidate designs. CAFFEINE accomplishes its task by tre- ing function induction as a tree-search problem. It constrains its tree search space via a canonical-functional-form grammar, and searches the space with grammatically constrained genetic programming. The second designer task is topology selection/topology design. Topology selection tools must consider a broad variety of topologies such that an app- priate topology is selected, must easily adapt to new semiconductor process nodes, and readily incorporate new topologies. Topology design tools must allow designers to creatively explore new topology ideas as rapidly as possible.

The contributions in this volume are written by the foremost international researchers and practitioners in the GP arena. They examine the similarities and differences between theoretical and empirical results on real-world problems. The text explores the synergy between theory and practice, producing a comprehensive view of the state of the art in GP application.

Topics include: FINCH: A System for Evolving Java, Practical Autoconstructive Evolution, The Rubik Cube and GP Temporal Sequence Learning, Ensemble classifiers: AdaBoost and Orthogonal Evolution of Teams, Self-modifying Cartesian GP, Abstract Expression Grammar Symbolic Regression, Age-Fitness Pareto Optimization, Scalable Symbolic Regression by Continuous Evolution, Symbolic Density Models, GP Transforms in Linear Regression Situations, Protein Interactions in a Computational Evolution System, Composition of Music and Financial Strategies via GP, and Evolutionary Art Using Summed Multi-Objective Ranks.

Readers will discover large-scale, real-world applications of GP to a variety of problem domains via in-depth presentations of the latest and most significant results in GP .

Genetic Programming Theory and Practice VII presents the results of the annual Genetic Programming Theory and Practice Workshop, contributed by the foremost international researchers and practitioners in the GP arena. Contributions examine the similarities and differences between theoretical and empirical results on real-world problems, and explore the synergy between theory and practice, producing a comprehensive view of the state of the art in GP application. Application areas include chemical process control, circuit design, financial data mining and bio-informatics, to name a few.

About this book: Discusses the hurdles encountered when solving large-scale, cutting-edge applications, provides in-depth presentations of the latest and most significant applications of GP and the most recent theoretical results with direct applicability to state-of-the-art problems. Genetic Programming Theory and Practice VII is suitable for researchers, practitioners and students of Genetic Programming, including industry technical staffs, technical consultants and business entrepreneurs.

This book describes new tools for front end analog designers, starting with global variation-aware sizing, and extending to novel variation-aware topology design. The tools aid design through automation, but more importantly, they also aid designer insight through automation. We now describe four design tasks, each more general than the previous, and how this book contributes design aids and insight aids to each. The ?rst designer task targeted is global robust sizing. This task is supported by a design tool that does automated, globally reliable, variation-aware s- ing (SANGRIA), and an insight-aiding tool that extracts designer-interpretable whitebox models that relate sizings to circuit performance (CAFFEINE). SANGRIA searches on several levels of problem dif?culty simultaneously, from lower cheap-to-evaluate "exploration" layers to higher full-evaluation "exploitation" layers (structural homotopy). SANGRIAmakes maximal use of circuit simulations by performing scalable data mining on simulation results to choose new candidate designs. CAFFEINE accomplishes its task by tre- ing function induction as a tree-search problem. It constrains its tree search space via a canonical-functional-form grammar, and searches the space with grammatically constrained genetic programming. The second designer task is topology selection/topology design. Topology selection tools must consider a broad variety of topologies such that an app- priate topology is selected, must easily adapt to new semiconductor process nodes, and readily incorporate new topologies. Topology design tools must allow designers to creatively explore new topology ideas as rapidly as possible.