A direct bitstream manipulation approach for Virtex4-based evolvable systems

This work proposes a new Evolvable Hardware (EHW) system able to exploit two-dimensional dynamic reconfigurability and direct bitstream manipulation. These features enhance performance by enabling the parallelism between the evaluation and the reconfiguration phase and by speeding-up the reconfiguration process. The system is hierarchically structured, and can thus be used to evolve circuits mixing the search capabilities offered by a fine grained evolution and the exploitation of functional building blocks typical of functional level evolution. Previous EHW systems were able to evolve simple analog and digital circuits like counters, multiplexers, etc. Our system can be used to quickly evolve circuits able to solve complex problems, like the inverse pendulum problem.