Evolvable Hardware System at Extreme Low Temperatures

This paper describes circuit evolutionary experiments at extreme low temperatures, including the test of all system components at this extreme environment (EE). In addition to hardening-by-process and hardening-bydesign, “hardening-by-reconfiguration”, when applicable, could be used to mitigate drifts, degradation, or damage on electronic devices (chips) in EE, by using re-configurable devices and an adaptive self-reconfiguration of their circuit topology. Conventional circuit design exploits device characteristics within a certain temperature/radiation range; when that is exceeded, the circuit function degrades. On a reconfigurable device, although component parameters change in EE, a new circuit design, suitable for new parameter values, may be mapped into the reconfigurable structure to recover the initial circuit function. This paper demonstrates this technique for circuit evolution and recovery at liquid nitrogen temperatures (-196.6°C). In addition, preliminary tests are performed to assess the survivability of the evolutionary processor at extreme low temperatures.

[1]  Vu Duong,et al.  Evolving circuits in seconds: experiments with a stand-alone board-level evolvable system , 2002, Proceedings 2002 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware.

[2]  Vu Duong,et al.  Circuit self-recovery experiments in extreme environments , 2004, Proceedings. 2004 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware, 2004..

[3]  Suheng Chen,et al.  Development of robust analog and mixed-signal electronics for extreme environment applications , 2004, 2004 IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720).

[4]  C. Viswanathan,et al.  Low-temperature mobility measurements on CMOS devices , 1989 .

[5]  Adrian Stoica,et al.  An Evolvable Hardware Platform Based on DSP and FPTA , 2002, GECCO Late Breaking Papers.

[6]  Peter J. Bentley,et al.  On Evolvable Hardware , 2001 .