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by
Peter Andersen
This is a master thesis in computer science from the Department
of Computer Science (Daimi) at the University of Aarhus.
The thesis is based on evolvable hardware experiments, i.e
automatic hardware design by an evolutionary approach. In these
experiments artificial evolutions of hardware circuits are
conducted in simulations and in real hardware, i.e. extrinsic and
intrinsic Evolvable HardWare (EHW). These two different
experiments are selected to cover the field of EHW as broad as
possible, and to investigate many aspect of the field.
Logic synthesis of combinatorial CMOS circuits using building
blocks like AND, NAND, OR, INV etc. The extrinsic EHW experiments
will investigate the possibility of lowering the level of
abstraction to switch transistors, and evolve combinatorial
circuits on this level. This case study will emphasise on the
construction of a good functional descriptive language for the
circuitry, and use this as a genetic encoding. Two descriptive
languages are defined, one constrained and one unconstrained. It
is shown that by constraining the descriptive language the
obtained results are improved.
In the intrinsic EHW experiment the practical problem of setting
up an evolutionary experiment in a physical circuitry environment
will be studied. A Field Programmable Analog Array (FPAA) will be
investigated as an example of an analog reconfigurable hardware
platform. The benchmark problem is the search for circuits that
work as an alternative for artificial neural networks for
classification. The focus of these experiments is the hardware
platform and it's interconnection with the evolutionary
algorithm. It is shown that it is possible to automatically
evolve circuits in this setting.
The thesis will also contain an overview of the current research
results and techniques in artificial evolution and their
applications in hardware design. The research field is often
classified by its surroundings, a section will briefly comment on
the related fields of EHW.
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Peter Andersen Email: peter at boelskifte-andersen dot dk |