To evolve in a changing environment

Reconfigurable hardware elements, such as FPGAs and FPAAs, have traditionally been used as glue logic or for the acceleration of specific mathematical functions, such as integer arithmetic. Their application in the area of biologically-inspired hardware has recently been investigated with varying degrees of success. Reconfigurable systems offer the ability to adapt hardware in real-time to help solve the changing requirements of a system as it and its environment change. This adaptability can be viewed similar to the adaptation of biological entities to their environments, to help solve the requirements of life, i.e. to survive and reproduce. This paper looks at Evolvable Hardware (EHW) as a solution to fault tolerance, by asking the question, “Can the hardware of the future adapt its configuration to tolerate the appearance of faults?”