On two new trends in evolvable hardware: employment of HDL-based structuring, and design of multi-functional circuits

This paper comments on some directions of growth for evolvable hardware, proposes research directions that address the scalability problem and gives examples of results in novel areas approached by EHW. The directions of growth include Software/Hardware hybrids, electronic/non-electronic hybrids, and networked systems. The research directions proposed here are (1) evolutionary compilation of descriptions from behavioral Hardware Description languages (HDL) to structural HDL (for both the case of digital and analog/mixed signal) (2) evolutionary synthesis, i.e. converting from synthesizable HDL to circuits and (3) hardware-software partitioning (co-design) for CPU/FPGA hybrids. The results presented here illustrate evolutionary design of multi-junctional/adaptive circuits including polymorphic and reconfiguration based circuits, and evolution of optimized circuits, in particular low-voltage circuits.