White-Box Op-Amp Design via Human-Mimicking Reasoning
This addresses the need for interpretable and reliable op-amp design in electronics, offering a novel approach compared to black-box methods.
The paper tackles the problem of designing operational amplifier parameters by proposing White-Op, an interpretable framework that mimics human reasoning to formulate and solve optimization problems, achieving reliable designs with only 8.52% theoretical prediction error across 9 topologies.
This brief proposes \emph{White-Op}, an interpretable operational amplifier (op-amp) parameter design framework based on the human-mimicking reasoning of large-language-model agents. We formalize the implicit human reasoning mechanism into explicit steps of \emph{\textbf{introducing hypothetical constraints}}, and develop an iterative, human-like \emph{\textbf{hypothesis-verification-decision}} workflow. Specifically, the agent is guided to introduce hypothetical constraints to derive and properly regulate positions of symbolically tractable poles and zeros, thus formulating a closed-form mathematical optimization problem, which is then solved programmatically and verified via simulation. Theory-simulation result analysis guides the decision-making for refinement. Experiments on 9 op-amp topologies show that, unlike the uninterpretable black-box baseline which finally fails in 5 topologies, White-Op achieves reliable, interpretable behavioral-level designs with only 8.52\% theoretical prediction error and the design functionality retains after transistor-level mapping for all topologies. White-Op is open-sourced at \textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/zhchenfdu/whiteop}.