Design of Novel Analog Compute Paradigms with Ark

TL;DR

This paper introduces Ark, a programming language for designing specialized reconfigurable analog circuits, enabling exploration of design trade-offs and impact of nonidealities in analog compute paradigms.

Contribution

Ark provides a novel methodology for co-designing reconfigurable analog circuits, bridging the gap between specialized and highly resource-efficient accelerators.

Findings

Ark effectively codifies the design space for various circuit problems.

Ark assists in exploring design trade-offs and nonidealities.

Demonstrated versatility across three circuit design problems.

Abstract

Previous efforts on reconfigurable analog circuits mostly focused on specialized analog circuits, produced through careful co-design, or on highly reconfigurable, but relatively resource inefficient, accelerators that implement analog compute paradigms. This work deals with an intermediate point in the design space: Specialized reconfigurable circuits for analog compute paradigms. This class of circuits requires new methodologies for performing co-design, as prior techniques are typically highly specialized to conventional circuit classes (e.g., filters, ADCs). In this context, we present Ark, a programming language for describing analog compute paradigms. Ark enables progressive incorporation of analog behaviors into computations, and deploys a validator and dynamical system compiler for verifying and simulating computations. We use Ark to codify the design space for three different exemplary circuit design problems, and demonstrate that Ark helps exploring design trade-offs and evaluating the impact of nonidealities to the computation.