Abstract
This paper describes the implementation of an evolvable hardware system on the Virtex Family of devices. The evaluation of the circuits is done intrinsically by downloading a portion of the bitstream that describes the changes from the baseline circuit. This reconfiguration system is achieved through the use of the Xilinx JBits API to identify and extract the changing bitstream. This partial reconfiguration process is very much faster than the previous methods of complete reconfiguration, leading to the complete evolution of a simple circuit in less than half an hour
Supported by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Steve Hartley. Java ga. http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/shartley/.
I. Harvey, P. Husbands, and D. Cliff. Seeing the light: Artificial evolution, real vision. In From Animals to Animats 3, Proceedings of the third international conference on simulation of adaptive behaviour, 1994.
J.H. Holland. Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems. University of Michigan Press, 1975.
G.S. Hollingworth, S.L. Smith, and A.M. Tyrrell. Design of highly parallel edge detection nodes using evolutionary techniques. In Proceedings of 7th Euromicro Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Processing. IEEE Press, 1999.
G.S. Hollingworth, S.L. Smith, and A.M. Tyrrell. Simulation of evolvable hardware to solve low level image processing tasks. In Poli et al., editor, Evolutionary Image Analysis, Signal Processing and Telecommunications, volume 1596 of LNCS, pages 46–58. Springer, 1999.
G.S. Hollingworth, S.L. Smith, and A.M. Tyrrell. To evolve in a changing environment. In IEE Colloquium on Reconfigurable Systems. IEE Informatics, March 1999.
H. Iba, M. Iwata, and T. Higuchi. Machine learning approach to gate-level evolvable hardware. In International Conference on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware. Springer, 1996.
H. Iba, M. Iwata, and T. Higuchi. Gate-level Evolvable Hardware: Empirical study and application, pages 259–279. Springer-Verlag, 1997.
Xilinx inc. Xc6200 field programmable gate array data book, 1995. http://www.xilinx.com/partinfo/6200.pdf.
Xilinx inc. Virtex field programmable gate arrays databook, 1999. http://www.xilinx.com/partinfo/ds003.pdf.
M. Iwata, I. Kajitani, H. Yamada, H. Iba, and T. Higuchi. A pattern recognition system using evolvable hardware. In International Conference on Evolutionary Computation: The 4th Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, pages 761–770. Springer, 1996.
D. Levi and S. Guccione. Geneticfpga: Evolving stable circuits on mainstream fpga devices. In The First NASA/DoD Workshop on Evolvable Hardware. IEEE Computer Society, 1999.
J.F. Miller. Evolution of digital filters using a gate array model. In Poli et al., editor, Evolutionary Image Analysis, Signal Processing and Telecommunications, volume 1596 of LNCS, pages 17–30. Springer, 1999.
M. Murakawa, S. Yoshizawa, I. Kajitani, T. Furuya, M. Iwata, and T. Higuchi. Hardware evolution at functional level. In International conference on Evolutionary Computation: The 4th Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, pages 62–71, 1996.
A. Thompson. Evolving Electronic Robot Controllers that exploit hardware resources., pages 640–656. Springer-Verlag, 1995.
A. Thompson. Evolutionary techniques for fault tolerance. UKACC International Conference on Control, pages 693–698, 1996.
A. Thompson. An evolved circuit, intrinsic in silicon, entwined with physics. In Procedures of the 1st international conference on Evolvable systems (ICES96). Springer, 1996.
A. Thompson. Temperature in natural and artificial systems. In P. Husbands and I. Harvey, editors, Proc. 4th Int. Conf. on Artificial Life (ECAL97), pages 388–397. MIT Press, 1997.
Xilinx. Jbits documentation, 1999. Published in JBits 2.0.1 documentation.
X. Yao and T. Higuchi. Promises and challenges of evolvable hardware. In International Conference on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware. Springer, 1996.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hollingworth, G., Smith, S., Tyrrell, A. (2000). The Intrinsic Evolution of Virtex Devices Through Internet Reconfigurable Logic. In: Miller, J., Thompson, A., Thomson, P., Fogarty, T.C. (eds) Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware. ICES 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1801. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46406-9_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46406-9_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67338-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46406-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive