On the "Evolvable Hardware" Approach to Electronic Design Invention

Our interest is in evolutionary electronics and its exploitation for invention. In this paper, we survey how the community currently tries to exploit the invention potential of evolvable hardware. We assess whether the current state-of-art in evolvable hardware has resulted in successful inventions or invention tools. We discuss the challenges faced by the community in this regard and how the community can overcome these challenges by exploiting nascent technologies, which include new design substrates, new computational paradigms and recently discovered design principles