Evolution of digital circuits

Abstract

Since the early 1990's researchers have begun to apply evolutionary algorithms to design electronic circuits. Nowadays it is evident that the evolutionary design approach can automatically create efficient electronic circuits in many domains. This tutorial surveys fundamental concepts of evolutionary circuit design. It introduces relevant search algorithms and basics of digital circuit design principles. Several case studies will be presented to demonstrate strength and weakness of the method, including evolutionary synthesis of gate-level circuits, image filter evolution in FPGA and evolution of benchmark circuits for evaluation of testability analysis methods. FPGAs will be presented as accelerators for evolutionary circuit design and circuit adaptation. Finally, it will be shown how to cope with the so-called scalability problem of evolutionary design which has been identified as the most important problem from the point of view of applications.