Abstract:
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have re-cently received renewed attention in the context of Evolvable Hardware (EHW). The most fine grained approach to changing th...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have re-cently received renewed attention in the context of Evolvable Hardware (EHW). The most fine grained approach to changing their internal structure, direct manipulation of the bitstream, has largely been abandoned. The undocumented bitstream formats of modern FPGAs made it complicated and error-prone. This situation has fundamentally changed with the advent of open-source FPGA toolchains. Previous attempts to exploit this opportunity were promising, but only manged to solve very basic tasks. We present in this paper an evolved tone discriminator circuit. It was evolved by replicating the most famous experiment in this field, but with modern hardware. For that we map the originally used Xilinx XC6200 FPGA to a modern Lattice iCE40 FPGA. We show how to set up the experiment and optimize the evolution environment. Our approach allows over 130 times more reconfigurations per second than previous approaches. Additionally, we discuss reasons for the abandonment of direct bitstream manipulation for EHW in context of the new possibilities created by open-source FPGA toolchains. We show which challenges have been solved and which steps need to be taken next.
Published in: 2022 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)
Date of Conference: 18-23 July 2022
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 06 September 2022
ISBN Information: