Intrinsic Evolution of Large Digital Circuits Using a Modular Approach

This work pioneers a generic and flexible approach to intrinsically evolve large digital circuits. One of the popular ways of handling the scalability problem prevalent in evolvable hardware (EHW) and evolve large circuits is to partition the circuit, evolve the individual partitions and then compact them. However, as the partition sizes become larger, this method also fails. This drawback is overcome by the modular developmental cartesian genetic programming (MDCGP) technique, which still uses partitioning, but augments it further with horizontal and vertical reuse. The results obtained are promising and show that there is 100% evolvability for 128-bit partitions, the largest partitions evolved so far. The fitness evaluation for the evolved partitions is done by downloading them onto Xilinx Virtex II Pro board. This work is the first step towards the development of a flexible evolvable framework which harnesses the power of hardware for the time consuming fitness evaluation and at the same time provides flexibility by carrying out the other parts using the easily modifiable software platform.