The Design and Implementation of Custom Architectures for Evolvable Hardware Using Off-the-Shelf Programmable Devices

In this paper we present the design and implementation of architectures suitable for evolving digital circuits and show how these architectures can be instantiated on 'off-the-shelf' commercial programmable logic devices such as Field Programmble Gate Arrays (FPGA's). We discuss architecture details and the design flow from the initial cell specification through to targeting specific commercial devices. We also present an example of such an implementation, where a simple fine-grained programmable logic array is designed and targeted to a number of popular commercial FPGA's. A critical discussion of this approach is also given.