A Fast Simulator in FPGA for LUT-Based Combinational Logic Circuits of Arbitrary Topology for Evolutionary Algorithms

Abstract

Current works on generation of combinational logic circuits (CLC) using evolutionary algorithms (EA) propose solutions using field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to accelerate the process of combinational circuit simulation, a step needed in order to evaluate the level of correctness of each individual circuit. However, the current works fail to separate the two distinct problems: the EA and the circuit simulator. The insistence of treating both problem as a single one results in works that fail to address either properly, restricting solutions to simple circuits and to topologically restrictive circuit simulators, while providing very limited data on the results. In this work, we address the circuit simulator problem exclusively, where we propose an architecture for fast simulation of n-LUT CLC of arbitrary topology. The proposed architecture is modular and makes no assumptions on the specific EA to be used with. We provide detailed performance results for varying circuit dimensions, and those results show that our architecture is able to surpass other works both in terms of performance and topological flexibility.