Worst-Case analysis of electrical and electronic equipment via affine arithmetic

Abstract

I would like to thank several people who have contributed in different ways towards the work accomplished in this thesis. First and foremost, I would like to express my utmost gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Flavio Canavero, for his encouragement, guidance, and support. His wide knowledge and insightful comments have made my candidature a truly enriching experience. I would also like to express my sincerest appreciation to my co-supervisor, Prof. Igor Stievano. His patience, motivation, and guidance have benefitted me immensely. This thesis work would not have been possible without his insightful thoughts. I would thank Dr. Paolo Manfredi and Riccardo Trinchero, for their time and efforts devoted in my research work, for the valuable suggestions and critical questions during this thesis. I also acknowledge my colleagues, Marchisio, Petrini, Fontana, Figura, Ubolli and Elisabetta, for their help and accompany in the last three years. Thanks to Dr. Sun Wen and Dr. Jiang Yanchao, for their generous help and encouragement. Finally, thanks to my best friends, Tiegang, Cunfa and Yuekun who have always been so supportive. And many thanks to my family, to my parents for their constant support in my life. To them I dedicate this thesis.

Circuit tolerance design by differential evolution with hybrid analysis method

“…Some uncertainties are caused by manufacturing process fluctuations, while others due to the environment such as operating temperature, voltage, and various ambient aging stressors [1]. The uncertainties cause circuit parameters to vary about their nominal target values.…”

“…On the other hand, these approaches gain speed at the cost of accuracy which usually produces underestimated results especially when the variations are huge or performance surfaces are highly nonlinear. Interval arithmetic based approaches [1,9,16] represents uncertain parameters by intervals and shows the response as an overestimated interval. Interval arithmetic based approaches have the notoriety of being overly pessimistic [17] due to the intractable interval expansion caused by dependence among interval operands.…”

“…Worst-case circuit tolerance analysis, which calculates the lower bounds and upper bounds of circuit response under parameter variations, has been widely used and studied in the literature [1,[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. Designing to worst-case circuit tolerance requirements guarantees product will function properly, regardless of the actual parameter variations.…”