Investigations on the Optimal Support Vector Machine Classifiers for Predicting Design Feasibility in Analog Circuit Optimization

In simulation-based circuit optimization, many simulation runs may be wasted while evaluating infeasible designs, i.e. the designs that do not meet the constraints. To avoid such a waste, this paper investigates the use of support vector machine (SVM) classifiers in predicting the design's feasibility prior to simulation and the optimal selection of the SVM parameters, namely, the Gaussian kernel shape parameter ${\gamma}$ and the misclassification penalty parameter C. These parameters affect the complexity as well as the accuracy of the model that SVM represents. For instance, the higher ${\gamma}$ is good for detailed modeling and the higher C is good for rejecting noise in the training set. However, our empirical study shows that a low ${\gamma}$ value is preferable due to the high spatial correlation among the circuit design candidates while C has negligible impacts due to the smooth and clean constraint boundaries of most circuit designs. The experimental results with an LC-tank oscillator example show that an optimal selection of these parameters can improve the prediction accuracy from 80 to 98% and model complexity by $10{\times}$.