ADDC: Automatic Design of Digital Circuit

Abstract

Digital circuits are one of the most important enabling technologies in the world today. Powerful tools, such as Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) have evolved over the past number of decades to allow designers to operate at high levels of abstraction and expressiveness, rather than at the gate level, which circuits are actually constructed from. Similarly, highly accurate digital circuit simulators permit designers to test their circuits before committing them to silicon. This is still a highly complex and generally manual task, however, with complex circuits taking months or even years to go from planning to silicon. We show how Grammatical Evolution (GE) can harness the standard tools of silicon design and be used to create a fully automatic circuit design system. Specifically, we use a HDL known as SystemVerilog and Icarus, a free, but powerful simulator, to generate circuits from high level descriptions. We apply our system to several well known digital circuit literature benchmarks and demonstrate that GE can successfully evolve functional circuits, including several which have been subsequently rendered in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).