Evolvable Hardware Module

• Lab 1 (Sessions 1 & 2)

Lab 1 will familiarise you with the XUP-V2Pro FPGA development board. You will be given a GA that evolves a 1-bit adder. The task is to learn how the GA works and interfaces to the hardware, and then to adjust the GA code to evolve a 2-bit adder.
Go to Lab 1

• Lab 2 (Sessions 3 & 4)

This lab will introduce the idea of using evolution to help remove errors caused by faulty components from a circuit.
Go to Lab 2

• Lectures 1

Lectures 1 gives an introduction to digital evolvable hardware. Examples of evolved circuits are given as well as a brief introduction to the hardware structures used to create them.
Download a pdf of lectures 1.

• Lectures 2

Lectures 2 starts with an introduction to the practical lab. Following is an overview of FPGAs, their inner workings and the software design flows.
Download a pdf of lectures 2.

• Lectures 3

Lectures 3 introduces CGP, an approach for evolving electronic circuits. Following are some digital EHW case studies.
Download a pdf of lectures 3.

• Lectures 4

Lectures 4 covers more digital EHW case studies.

• Hardware

Digilent sell a number of FPGA development boards at a reasonable price that would allow you to investigate evolvable hardware yourself.

Digilent's Nexys-2 Spartan 3E board is a good option.

Another digilent board with a Spartan 3 device.

Xilinx do a free version of their ISE tools called WebPACK.

• Further Reading

Introduction to Evolvable Hardware, A Practical guide for designing self-adaptive systems. Garrison Greenwood, Andrew Tyrrell.

The proceedings of the International Conference on Evolvable Systems, contains many papers on evolvable hardware.