A Programmable and Configurable ASIC to Generate Piecewise-Affine Functions Defined Over General Partitions

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems. I, Regular papers Regular papers, 2013-12, Vol.60 (12), p.3182-3194
• Main Authors: Brox, Piedad, Castro-Ramirez, Javier, Martinez-Rodriguez, Macarena C., Tena, Erica, Jimenez, Carlos J., Baturone, Iluminada, Acosta, Antonio J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Application specific integrated circuits; Approximation methods; Binary search trees; Digital architectures; embedded control; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; nonlinear circuits; piecewise-affine (PWA) functions; Predictive models; VLSI implementation
• ISSN: 1549-8328; 1558-0806
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSI.2013.2265962

This paper presents a programmable and configurable architecture and its inclusion in an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) to generate Piecewise-Affine (PWA) functions. A Generic PWA form (PWAG) has been selected for integration, because of its suitability to implement any PWA function without resorting to approximation. The design of the ASIC in a 90 nm TSMC technology, its integration, test and characterization through different examples are detailed in the paper. Furthermore, the ASIC verification using an ASIC-in-the-loop methodology for embedded control applications is presented. To assess the characteristics of this verification, the double-integrator, a usual control application example has been considered. Experimental results validate the proposed architecture and the ASIC implementation.