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.

翻译：先前关于可重构模拟电路的研究主要集中于两类方案：一类是通过协同设计精心定制的专用模拟电路，另一类是高度可重构但资源效率相对较低的模拟计算范式加速器。本工作探索了设计空间中的中间点：面向模拟计算范式的专用可重构电路。由于现有技术通常高度局限于传统电路类别（如滤波器、模数转换器），这类电路需要新的协同设计方法。为此，我们提出Ark，一种用于描述模拟计算范式的编程语言。Ark能够将模拟行为渐进式地融入计算过程，并配备验证器与动态系统编译器对计算进行验证与仿真。我们利用Ark对三个不同典型电路设计问题的设计空间进行形式化编码，证明Ark有助于探索设计权衡并评估非理想因素对计算的影响。