Evolving Hardware with Self-reconfigurable connectivity in Xilinx FPGAs

Abstract

Randomly connecting networks have proven to be universal computing machines. By interconnecting a set of nodes in a random way one can model very complicated non-linear dynamic systems. Although random Boolean networks (RBN) use Boolean functions as their basic component, there are not hardware implementations of such systems. The absence of implementations is mainly due to the arbitrary connectionism exhibited by the network, and connection flexibility use to be very expensive in terms of hardware resources. In this paper we present an on-chip self-reconfigurable approach for providing a flexible connectionism at very low resource cost by partially reconfiguring Virtex II FPGAs