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ABSTRACT: Future remote interplanetary space mission will drive the system
to higher degrees of autonomy to adapt to new environments and perform
new functions, beyond those specified at launch. Adaptation enables
long-life meaningful survivability and should include both software and
hardware. Reconfigurable hardware could speedup computation intensive
tasks by orders of magnitude and could ensure fault-tolerance bypassing
faulty cells. Evolvable Hardware is reconfigurable hardware that
self-configures under the control of an evolutionary algorithm. The
search for a hardware configuration can be performed using software
models or, faster and more accurate, directly in reconfigurable
hardware. Initial experiments demonstrate the possibility to
automatically synthesize both digital and analog circuits. The paper
introduces an approach to automated synthesis of CMOS circuits based on
evolution on Programmable Transistor Arrays (PTAs). The approach is
illustrated by an experiment showing evolutionary synthesis of a circuit
with a desired DC characteristic; evolution using a software model of
the PTA took ~20 minutes on a supercomputer and is expected to be take
~5 seconds on a PTA chip
Aerospace Conference, 1999. Proceedings. 1999 IEEE; 02/1999
