DNA tiling for digital evolvable hardware

Platforms for digital evolvable hardware have been dominated by reconfigurable chips in the form of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Despite a number of successes with such a computation medium for evolving digital designs, it is commonly accepted that technological constraints are limiting the potential inherent in such evolutionary techniques. Thus, it is desirable to investigate potential technologies that enable exploitation of the technology itself, despite a digital computational model. This paper presents a preliminary investigation into DNA tiling as a platform for digital Evolvable Hardware. Consideration is given to ways in which such a biological medium could be adapted so as to offer a platform for digital design, exploitable and tunable through the application of an evolutionary algorithm, enabling a digital design to emerge. The solutions proposed consider two different forms of DNA tiling Algorithmic and Logical. Further, the proposed solutions are compared to FPGA technology in the light of the requirements that evolutionary approaches place on the underlying technology and challenges highlighted provide a guideline for further investigation into the viability of such a platform.