Evolvable Hardware

Systems whose architecture evolves over time are called Evolvable Systems [1]. The research area of Evolvable Hardware consists mainly of the evolution of analog and digital circuits [5]. Each individual of the evolving population represents a particular circuit. The individuals are either evaluated in simulation (extrinsic evolution) or directly in hardware (intrinsic evolution). The time needed to manually build the circuits is prohibitive. Therefore, dynamically reconfigurable chips such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are used to evaluate the individuals. Usually, the individuals are evaluated one after the other on a single reconfigurable chip. The topology of the circuit is determined by the genetic material of the individual. We will first address evolution of analog circuits and then turn to evolution of digital circuits.