Title :
Toward evolvable hardware chips: Experiments with a programmable transistor array
Author_Institution :
Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Technol., Pasadena, CA, USA
Abstract :
Evolvable hardware is reconfigurable hardware that self-configures under the control of an evolutionary algorithm. The search for a hardware configuration can be performed using software models or, faster and more accurate, directly, in reconfigurable hardware. Several experiments have demonstrated the possibility to automatically synthesize both digital and analog circuits. The paper introduces an approach to automated synthesis of CMOS circuits, based on evolution on a programmable transistor array (PTA). The approach is illustrated with a software experiment showing evolutionary synthesis of a circuit with a desired DC characteristic. A hardware implementation of a test PTA chip is then described, and the same evolutionary experiment is performed on the chip demonstrating circuit synthesis/self-configuration directly in hardware
Keywords :
CMOS integrated circuits; circuit CAD; evolutionary computation; integrated circuit design; programmable circuits; reconfigurable architectures; CMOS circuits; DC characteristic; analog circuits; automated synthesis; circuit synthesis/self-configuration; digital circuits; evolutionary algorithm; evolvable hardware chips; programmable transistor array; reconfigurable hardware; Analog circuits; Automatic control; Automatic testing; Circuit synthesis; Circuit testing; Evolutionary computation; Hardware; Semiconductor device modeling; Software performance; Transistors;
Conference_Titel :
Microelectronics for Neural, Fuzzy and Bio-Inspired Systems, 1999. MicroNeuro '99. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Granada
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-0043-9
DOI :
10.1109/MN.1999.758859