Evolvable Hardware (EHW) refers to one particular type of hardware whose
architecture/structure and functions change dynamically and autonomously in order to
improve its performance in performing certain tasks. The emergence of this new field in
recent years has been influenced profoundly by the progress in reconfigurable hardware
and evolutionary computation. Instead of manually designing a circuit, only
input/output-relations are specified. The circuit is automatically designed using an
adaptive algorithm (e.g. Genetic Algorithm). In this algorithm, a set (population) of
circuits -- i.e. circuit representations, are first randomly generated. The behaviour of
each circuit is evaluated and the best circuits are combined to generate new and
hopefully better circuits. The evaluation is according to the behaviour initially
specified by the user.
You are required first to introduce the concept of Evolvable Hardware
and describe the current state of the art techniques to evolve circuits. Possibilities and
limitations of applying evolvable hardware to real-world applications would be useful.
This page is maintained by Shawki Areibi, sareibi@uoguelph.ca
Last modified August 2008