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：先前针对可重构模拟电路的研究，主要聚焦于通过精细协同设计产生的专用模拟电路，或是实现模拟计算范式但资源效率较低的高度可重构加速器。本研究探索设计空间中的中间地带：面向模拟计算范式的专用可重构电路。此类电路需要新的协同设计方法，因为现有技术通常高度专用于传统电路类别（如滤波器、模数转换器）。在此背景下，我们提出Ark——一种用于描述模拟计算范式的编程语言。Ark支持将模拟行为逐步融入计算过程，并部署验证器与动态系统编译器来验证和仿真计算。我们利用Ark为三种不同范例电路设计问题编码设计空间，并证明Ark有助于探索设计权衡、评估非理想特性对计算的影响。