A Novel Mutation Strategy to Accelerate Evolutionary Design of Circuits

Evolvable hardware (EHW) is a novel technique to design circuits automatically. One of the main difficulties of EHW applying real-world applications is its scalability. This paper focuses on decreasing computation complexity to improve the scalability of combinational logic circuit evolutionary design and proposes a novel mutation strategy - SLP-mutation (short link priority mutation). The mutation operator encourages short link and multi-layer, which meets the structure characteristic of relatively complex circuit. Evolution strategy introducing SLP-mutation (SLP-mutation ES) reduces search space of the evolution design and the computation complexity. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of SLP-mutation ES.