Evolvable Hardware (EHW) refers to HW design andself-reconfiguration using evolutionary/genetic mechanisms. The paperpresents an overview of some key concepts of EHW, comments on selectedapplications, and presents a perspective on the development of thefield. A fine-grained Field Programmable Transistor Array (FPTA)architecture for reconfigurable hardware is presented as an example ofan initial effort toward evolution-oriented devices. Evolutionaryexperiments in simulations and with a FPTA chip in-the-loop demonstrateautomatic synthesis of electronic circuits. Unconventional circuits, forwhich there are no textbook design guidelines, are particularlyappealing to evolvable hardware. To illustrate this situation, onedemonstrates here the evolution of circuits implementing parametricalconnectives for fuzzy logics. In addition to synthesizing circuits fornew functions, evolvable hardware can be used to preserve existingfunctions and achieve fault-tolerance, determining circuitconfigurations that circumvent the faults. These characteristics areextremely important for enabling spacecraft to survive harshenvironments and to have long life. Expanding reconfiguration to othertypes of spacecraft hardcore (i.e. optics, MEMS, etc.) could lead toevolvable space systems
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