A Fast Design Optimization of On-Chip Equalizing Links Using Particle Swarm Optimization

We propose a fast algorithm to optimize on-chip equalizing link design utilizing a particle swarm optimization (PSO) method. Finding the optimal design parameters of an equalizing link requires too much computation time, because the dependency between design parameters and performances is too complex, while design space is too large. The proposed algorithm greatly reduces the optimization time by utilizing the superior efficiency of PSO in heuristic search. In experiment, on average, the proposed algorithm optimized a link design 168× faster than the previous state-of-the-art result, requiring only 1/256 evaluation counts, and reduced computation time from about 2 h to 45 s.