Hardware implementation of genetic algorithm modules for intelligent systems

A genetic algorithm (GA) is an intelligent search strategy supported by operations inspired by biological evolution. Although a GA is able to find very good solutions for a variety of applications, it typically requires many computations and iterations to be effective, and the amount of time consumed by these computations and iterations is enormous. Thus, software implementations of GAs applied to increasingly complex problems and large search spaces can cause unacceptable delays. An alternative to this approach is the hardware implementation of GAs in order to achieve tremendous speedup over software counterparts by exploiting the inherent parallelism of the GA paradigm. This paper presents the design of libraries of hardware modules for a GA system - one library in the Hardware Description Language (HDL) Verilog HDL and one in the language VHDL. Each library is based on a widely used MATLAB library.