From Specification to Topology: Automatic Power Converter Design via Reinforcement Learning
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
1-1-2021
Abstract
The tidal waves of modern electronic/electrical devices have led to increasing demands for ubiquitous application-specific power converters. A conventional manual design procedure of such power converters is computation- and labor-intensive, which involves selecting and connecting component devices, tuning component-wise parameters and control schemes, and iteratively evaluating and optimizing the design. To automate and speed up this design process, we propose an automatic framework that designs custom power converters from design specifications using reinforcement learning. Specifically, the framework embraces upper-confidence-bound-tree-based (UCT-based) reinforcement learning to automate topology space exploration with circuit design specification-encoded reward signals. Moreover, our UCT-based approach can exploit small offline data via the specially designed default policy to accelerate topology space exploration. Further, it utilizes a hybrid circuit evaluation strategy to substantially reduces design evaluation costs. Empirically, we demonstrated that our framework could generate energy-efficient circuit topologies for various target voltage conversion ratios. Compared to existing automatic topology optimization strategies, the proposed method is much more computationally efficient — it can generate topologies with the same quality while being up to 67% faster. Additionally, we discussed some interesting circuits discovered by our framework.
Identifier
85124149144 (Scopus)
ISBN
[9781665445078]
Publication Title
IEEE ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design Digest of Technical Papers Iccad
External Full Text Location
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCAD51958.2021.9643552
ISSN
10923152
Volume
2021-November
Grant
CNS–1948457
Fund Ref
National Science Foundation
Recommended Citation
Fan, Shaoze; Cao, Ningyuan; Zhang, Shun; Li, Jing; Guo, Xiaoxiao; and Zhang, Xin, "From Specification to Topology: Automatic Power Converter Design via Reinforcement Learning" (2021). Faculty Publications. 4445.
https://digitalcommons.njit.edu/fac_pubs/4445
