Intrinsic evolvable hardware platform for digital circuit design and repair using genetic algorithms

A hardware/software platform for intrinsic evolvable hardware is designed and evaluated for digital circuit design and repair on Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Dynamic bitstream compilation for mutation and crossover operators is achieved by directly manipulating the bitstream using a layered framework. Experimental results on a case study have shown that benchmark circuit evolution from an unseeded initial population, as well as a complete recovery of a stuck-at fault is achievable using this platform. An average of 0.47 mu s is required to perform the genetic mutation, 4.2 mu s to perform the single point conventional crossover, 3.1 mu s to perform Partial Match Crossover (PMX) as well as Order Crossover (OX), 2.8 mu s to perform Cycle Crossover (CX), and 1.1 ms for one input pattern intrinsic evaluation. These represent a performance advantage of three orders of magnitude over the JBITS software framework and more than seven orders of magnitude over the Xilinx design tool driven flow for realizing intrinsic genetic operators on Xilinx Virtex Family devices. (C) 2012 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved