Toward on-board synthesis and adaptation of electronic functions: An evolvable hardware approach

Future remote interplanetary space mission will drive the system to higher degrees of autonomy to adapt to new environments and perform new functions, beyond those specified at launch. Adaptation enables long-life meaningful survivability and should include both software and hardware. Reconfigurable hardware could speedup computation intensive tasks by orders of magnitude and could ensure fault-tolerance bypassing faulty cells. Evolvable Hardware is reconfigurable hardware that self-configures under the control of an evolutionary algorithm. The search for a hardware configuration can be performed using software models or, faster and more accurate, directly in reconfigurable hardware. Initial experiments demonstrate the possibility to automatically synthesize both digital and analog circuits. The paper introduces an approach to automated synthesis of CMOS circuits based on evolution on Programmable Transistor Arrays (PTAs). The approach is illustrated by an experiment showing evolutionary synthesis of a circuit with a desired DC characteristic; evolution using a software model of the PTA took ~20 minutes on a supercomputer and is expected to be take ~5 seconds on a PTA chip