On the Evolution of Hardware Circuits via Reconfigurable Architectures

Abstract

Traditionally, hardware circuits are realized according to techniques that follow the classical phases of design and testing. A completely new approach in the creation of hardware circuits has been proposed---the Evolvable Hardware (EHW) paradigm, which bases the circuit synthesis on a goal-oriented evolutionary process inspired by biological evolution in Nature. FPGA-based approaches have emerged as the main architectural solution to implement EHW systems. Various EHW systems have been proposed by researchers but most of them, being based on outdated chips, do not take advantage of the interesting features introduced in newer FPGAs. This article describes a project named Hardware Evolution over Reconfigurable Architectures (HERA), which aims at creating a complete and performance-oriented framework for the evolution of digital circuits, leveraging the reconfiguration technology available in FPGAs. The project is described from its birth to its current state, presenting its evolutionary technique tailored for FPGA-based circuits and the most recent enhancements to improve the scalability with respect to problem size. The developed EHW system outperforms the state of the art, proving its effectiveness in evolving both standard benchmarks and more complex real-world applications.