A Multi-cellular Developmental Representation for Evolution of Adaptive Spiking Neural Microcircuits in an FPGA

It has been shown that evolutionary and developmental processes can be used for emergence of scalability, robustness and fault-tolerance in hardware. However, designing a suitable representation for such processes is far from straightforward. Here, a bio-inspired developmental genotype-phenotype mapping for evolution of spiking neural microcircuits in an FPGA is introduced, based on a digital neuron model and cortex structure suggested and verified previously by the authors. The new developmental process is based on complex multi-cellular protein-protein and gene-protein interactions and signaling. Suitability of the representation for evolution of useful architectures and its adaptability is shown through statistical analysis and examples of scalability, modularity and fault-tolerance.