Design of single-electron systems through artificial evolution.

We show how evolutionary methods can help in the design of singleelectronic circuits with an example of evolving a simple NOR gate. Evolutionary algorithms, capturing the bare essentials of Darwinian evolution, work difierently from conventional design methods, and have the potential to explore new territory. Our preliminary evolved circuit is far from an ideal NOR gate, but has interesting properties. It was evolved to work at a temperature of 340mK, and its performance deteriorates if the temperature is lowered, as well as if it is increased. This is contrary to the usual behaviour of single-electronic circuits, which generally improve with decreasing temperature. We hypothesise that the circuit exploits or relies upon the simulated efiects of the particular thermal energies of the electrons at around 340mK.

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