Some applications of FPGAs in bio-inspired hardware

If one considers life on Earth since its very beginning, three levels of organization can be distinguished: the phylogenetic level concerns the temporal evolution of the genetic programs within individuals and species, the ontogenetic level concerns the developmental process of a single multicellular organism, and the epigenetic level concerns the learning processes during an individual organism´s lifetime. In analogy to nature, the space of bio-inspired hardware systems can be partitioned along these three axes, phylogeny, ontogeny, and epigenesis, giving rise to the POE model, recently introduced by M. Sipper et al. (1997). In this short paper we briefly present three FPGA-based systems, each situated along a different axis of the POE model