Evolving both Hardware Subsystems and the Selection of Variants of such into an Assembled System

Evolvable Hardware (EHW) has been proposed as a new method for designing electronic circuits. However, there are several problems to solve for making high performance systems. One is the limited scalability of the ordinary approach. To reduce this problem, a novel digital signal processing architecture has been developed that allows for incremental evolution. This is based on initially evolving subcircuits. In this paper, it is extended by evolving the best possible combination of subcircuits. Each such circuit is selected among a set of alternative circuits. The architecture is applied as a prosthetic hand controller. By applying the proposed method, the average performance is improved compared to more ordinary approaches.