Evolvable hardware

Evolvable hardware (EH) is a field focusing on the use of evolutionary algorithms (EA) to create specialized electronics without manual engineering. It brings together reconfigurable hardware, artificial intelligence, fault tolerance and autonomous systems. Evolvable hardware refers to hardware that can change its architecture and behavior dynamically and autonomously by interacting with its environment.

In its most fundamental form an evolutionary algorithm manipulates a population of individuals where each individual describes how to construct a candidate circuit. Each circuit is assigned a fitness, which indicates how well a candidate circuit satisfies the design specification. The evolutionary algorithm uses stochastic operators to evolve new circuit configurations from existing ones. Done properly, over time the evolutionary algorithm will evolve a circuit configuration that exhibits desirable behavior.

Each candidate circuit can either be simulated or physically implemented in a reconfigurable device. Typical reconfigurable devices are field-programmable gate arrays (for digital designs) or field-programmable analog arrays (for analog designs). At a lower level of abstraction are the field-programmable transistor arrays that can implement either digital or analog designs.

The concept was pioneered by Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex, England, who in 1996 evolved a tone discriminator using fewer than 40 programmable logic gates and no clock signal in a FPGA. This is a remarkably small design for such a device and relied on exploiting peculiarities of the hardware that engineers normally avoid. For example, one group of gates has no logical connection to the rest of the circuit, yet is crucial to its function.

In many cases, conventional design methods (formulas, etc.) can be used to design a circuit. But in other cases, the design specification doesn't provide sufficient information to permit using conventional design methods. For example, the specification may only state desired behavior of the target hardware.

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