Experiments on the evolution of digital to analog converters

Evolvable Hardware (EHW) applications have, so far, encompassed the synthesis of standard analog and digital circuits' building blocks through Genetic Algorithms (GAs). Currently, the research effort in EHW is being driven towards twofold purposes: the synthesis of circuits of medium to high complexity; and the design of reconfigurable architectures that facilitate the system evolvability and on-chip implementation of the evolved circuits. This work addresses these issues by describing the evolution of Digital to Analog Converters (DACs). We investigate the efficiency of the evolutionary system when using different representations and when evolving current and voltage mode circuits. A new technique based on hierarchical evolution is devised to enhance the evolutionary speed and the design scalability. New methods to increase the competitiveness of the evolved designs are also discussed.