Intrinsic Evolution of Analog Circuits Using Field Programmable Gate Arrays

Abstract

Evolvable hardware is a field of study exploring the application of evolutionary algorithms to hardware systems during design, operation, or both. The work presented here focuses on the use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), a type of dynamically reconfigurable hardware device typically used for electronic prototyping in conjunction with a newly created open-source platform for performing intrinsic analog evolvable hardware experiments. This work targets the reproduction of seminal field experiments that generated complex analog dynamics of unclocked FPGAs evolved through genetic manipulation of their binary circuit representation: the bitstream. Further, it demonstrates the intrinsic evolution of two nontrivial analog circuits with intriguing properties, amplitude maximization and pulse oscillation, as well as the robustness of evolved circuits to temperature variation and across-chip circuit translation.