A Harris Hawks Optimizer Based Hybrid Algorithm for Optimal Design of Analog Integrated Circuits

With the latest advancements in semiconductor industry and growing complexity of modern integrated circuits, the rise in the need for design automation tools became inevitable. Unlike digital circuit design, the analog circuit automation, owing to its complexity, still isn’t as mature. In this paper, a hybrid algorithm is proposed that employs traits of Harris Hawks Optimizer (HHO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) along with archiving technique to design and optimize FinFet folded-cascode operational amplifier. The idea is to facilitate the explorational capabilities of HHO by incorporating basic GA operations. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is first demonstrated on a set of benchmark functions, where it is compared with other techniques. Afterwards the algorithm is used to design a folded-cascode operational amplifier, where the design parameters are refined all at once as a single objective function. Results show clear advantage of the proposed method over the conventional approach.