Acceleration of transistor-level evolution using Xilinx Zynq Platform

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to introduce a new accelerator developed to address the problem of evolutionary synthesis of digital circuits at transistor level. The proposed accelerator, based on recently introduced Xilinx Zynq platform, consists of a discrete simulator implemented in programmable logic and an evolutionary algorithm running on a tightly coupled embedded ARM processor. The discrete simulator was introduced in order to achieve a good trade-off between the precision and performance of the simulation of transistor-level circuits. The simulator is implemented using the concept of virtual reconfigurable circuit and operates on multiple logic levels which enables to evaluate the behavior of candidate transistor-level circuits at a reasonable level of detail. In this work, the concept of virtual reconfigurable circuit was extended to enable bidirectional data flow which represents the basic feature of transistor level circuits. According to the experimental evaluation, the proposed architecture speeds up the evolution in one order of magnitude compared to an optimized software implementation. The developed accelerator is utilized in the evolution of basic logic circuits having up to 5 inputs. It is shown that solutions competitive to the circuits obtained by conventional design methods can be discovered.