A novel platform for complex bio-inspired architectures

Cellular architectures represent the natural approach to apply bio-inspired mechanisms to the world of digital hardware. To derive any useful property (in terms of computation) from these mechanisms, however, it is necessary to examine systems that are large enough to pose problems for conventional design methodologies. Moreover, implementing these mechanisms in actual hardware is the only way to ensure that they are efficient from a computational standpoint. The realization of this kind of systems, however, requires resources that are both quantitatively and qualitatively different from conventional, off-the-shelf platforms. In this article, we describe a novel hardware platform aimed at the realization of cellular architectures. The system is built hierarchically from a very simple computing unit, called ECell. Several of these units can then be connected, using a high-speed serial communication protocol, to a more complex structure called the EStack. Consisting of four different kinds of interconnected boards (computational, routing, power supply, and display), these stacks can then be joined together to form an arbitrarily large parallel network of programmable circuits