Preface

Computational intelligence has been an astounding success in the engineering domain, particularly in electronic design. Over the last two decades, improved techniques have raised the productivity of designers to a remarkable degree. Indeed, in the areas of digital, analog, radio-frequency, and mixed-signal engineering, there is a focused effort on trying to automate all levels of the design flow of electronic circuits, a field where it was long assumed that progress demanded a skilled designer’s expertise. Thus, new computational-based modeling, synthesis and design methodologies, and applications of optimization algorithms have been proposed for assisting the designer’s task. This book offers the reader a collection of recent advances in computational intelligence—algorithms, design methodologies, and synthesis techniques—applied to the design of integrated circuits and systems. It highlights new biasing and sizing approaches and optimization techniques and their application to the design of high-performance digital, VLSI, radio-frequency, and mixed-signal circuits and systems. As editors, we invited experts from related design disciplines to contribute overviews of their particular fields, and we grouped these into the following: