Resurrecting FPGA Intrinsic Analog Evolvable Hardware

EasyChair Preprint 5169

Abstract

In the spirit of past century evolvable hardware, we explore the application of evolutionary algorithms to field programmable gate arrays and provide an open source platform for performing intrinsic analog evolvable hardware experiments. We target the  reproduction of seminal field experiments that generated complex analog dynamics of unclocked FPGAs which were evolved through genetic manipulation of their binary circuit representation: the bitstream.  Further, we demonstrate the intrinsic evolution of two non-trivial analog circuits with intriguing properties: amplitude maximization and pulse oscillation. Lastly, we explore the robustness of evolved circuits to temperature variation and across-chip circuit translation.

Keyphrases: Analog Electronic Design, Evolvable Hardware, FPGA, evolutionary algorithm

@booklet{EasyChair:5169,
  author    = {Derek Whitley and Jason Yoder and Nicklas Carpenter},
  title     = {Resurrecting FPGA Intrinsic Analog Evolvable Hardware},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 5169},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}