Reconfigurable VLSI architectures for evolvable hardware: from experimental field programmable transistor arrays to evolution-oriented chips

Evolvable hardware (EHW) addresses on-chip adaptation and self-configuration through evolutionary algorithms. Current programmable devices, in particular the analog ones, lack evolution-oriented characteristics. This paper proposes an evolution-oriented field programmable transistor array (FPTA), reconfigurable at transistor level. The FPTA allows evolutionary experiments with reconfiguration at various levels of granularity. Experiments in SPICE simulations and directly on a reconfigurable FPTA chip demonstrate how the evolutionary approach can be used to automatically synthesize a variety of analog and digital circuits.