Adaptive and evolvable hardware and systems: the state of the art and the prospectus for future development

Evolvable Hardware, Evolutionary Design, Reconfigurable Hardware, Field Programmable Analogue Arrays

This paper is an overview on the Evolvable Hardware (EHW) - the exciting and rapidly expanding industrial application area of the Evolutionary Computing (EC), of the Genetic Algorithms especially. The content of the work has the following structure: the first part includes generalities on industrial applications of EC, and the importance of EHW in this frame; the second part presents the outstanding technological support making possible the implementation of system adaptation in hardware. Different kind of programmable circuits arrays are introduced. The third part tackles the most known EC based methods for EHW implementation; the fourth part deals with some concrete elements of the EHW design, including the current limits in evolutionary design of digital circuits. The last part is focused on some concluding remarks with regard to future perspectives of the area. A list of references used in this work was inserted at the end.