Automatic synthesis and fault-tolerant experiments on an evolvable hardware platform

Outer solar system exploration and missions to comets and planets with severe environmental conditions require long-term survivability of space systems. This challenge has recently been approached with new ideas, such as using mechanisms for hardware adaptation inspired from biology. The application of evolution-inspired formalisms to hardware design and self-configuration lead to the concept of evolvable hardware (EHW). EHW refers to self-reconfiguration of electronic hardware by evolutionary/genetic reconfiguration mechanisms. The paper describes a fine-grained Field Programmable Transistor Array (FPTA) architecture for reconfigurable hardware, and its implementation on a VLSI chip. A first experiment illustrates automatic synthesis of electronic circuits through evolutionary design with the chip-in-the-loop. The chip is rapidly reconfigured to evaluate candidate circuit designs. A second, fault-tolerance experiment shows how evolutionary algorithms can recover functionality after being subjected to faults, by finding new circuit configurations that circumvent the faults.