MEH: modular evolvable hardware for designing complex circuits

Evolvable hardware adjusts oneself to changeable environments by self-organizing the circuit. Due to its high productivity and creativity for designing circuit, it is widely investigated. However, it is very difficult to apply it to a complicated circuit, because the search space increases exponentially as the complexity of hardware. In this paper, we propose a modular approach to evolving complex hardware circuits effectively. A comparative experiment with the conventional evolutionary approach indicates that the proposed method works 50∼1000 times faster and yields a more optimized hardware.