Electronic circuit design

A system for optimising electronic circuits to be designed has two parts or phases, a training phase 10 in which optimisation scenarios for selected electronic circuits are derived using an evolutionary algorithm, and an operation phase 11, in which the derived optimisation scenarios are used to optimise new electronic circuits to be designed. The training phase 10 uses an evolutionary algorithm to produce a specialised and relatively fast optimisation scenario for each of a plurality of input circuits or groups of circuits (step 13). One or more of the evolved specialist optimisation scenarios are then selected to form a suite of optimisation scenarios (step 15) for use to optimise new circuits to be designed. In the operation phase 11, a new circuit to be optimised is input at step 18, and a plurality of optimisation scenarios from the suite of optimisation scenarios 15 is then used to try to optimise the new circuit (step 19). The best optimisation result is taken as the optimisation for the circuit (step 20)