Reducing hardware evolution's dependency on FPGAs

Abstract

The field of intrinsic hardware evolution currently relies heavily on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. Many types are available commercially, however most are unsuitable for hardware evolution since they take too long to reconfigure. This paper explores various alternative forms of evolvable media and re-addresses circumstances for which extrinsic hardware evolution map be appropriate. In particular, a general-purpose evolvable testbed is presented together with results exemplifying its use for three different test cases, and a direct comparison is made using the testbed of the relative merits of extrinsic versus intrinsic hardware evolution.