Bitstream Evolution: an Open-Source FPGA Intrinsic Evolvable Hardware Toolkit¶

The field of intrinsic, bitstream-level, evolvable hardware has recently been resurrected and interest in the area has begun to grow. This paper presents a low barrier-to-entry software and hardware platform allowing evolvable hardware researchers to conduct experiments, visualize results, and share data. The system’s open-source software is designed to enable iterative enhancements so that contributors from around the world can participate. To encourage community development, we detail the process and results of several of our experiments, which can be used as a reference for further study. Additionally, we discuss the results of our experiments, focusing in particular on their implications with respect to the question of robustness and transferability of evolved hardware circuits. Our results demonstrate significant potential for evolving circuits that not only maintain long-term functionality but can also operate effectively outside their original evolutionary environments. These results demonstrate the feasibility of intrinsic, bitstream level evolution which, in the long run, could increase the efficiency and lower the power requirements of modern computing and artificial intelligence systems. We discuss open questions for the field and directions for future work including stability, transferability, robustness, quality diversity, signal processing, and security.