Development brings scalability to hardware evolution

Abstract

The scalability problem is a major impediment to the use of hardware evolution for real-world circuit design problems. A potential solution is to model the map between genotype and phenotype on biological development. Although development has been shown to improve scalability for a few toy problems, it has not been demonstrated for any circuit design problems. This paper presents such a demonstration for two problems, the n-bit adder with carry and even n-bit parity problems, and shows that development imposes, and benefits from, fewer constraints on evolutionary innovation than other approaches to scalability.