Abstract
Optimization has been used in many areas of electrical and computer engineering. This paper presents the idea of applying an optimization based approach to solve system-level topology exploration issues in design of circuits and systems. It is found that for many classes of circuits, the topology exploration problem can be formulated as an optimization one, which can then be optimally solved. The resulting design solutions have been shown to be much better or at least very competitive compared to traditional ones in the literature. We illustrate the optimization based approach in the context of switched-capacitor biquad filter circuits. Experiments confirm the flexibility and efficiency of the approach under various design tradeoffs.