Surveys¶

This book chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the evolvable hardware field as of the early 2000s. Gordon and Bentley examine the state of electronic circuit production and note that increasingly complex behaviors are being demanded from electronic circuits, fueled by improvements in circuit embodiment technologies. This creates a bottleneck at the point of circuit design — a bottleneck that evolutionary approaches to hardware design aim to address. The chapter covers the key concepts, techniques, and results in the field, providing context for both researchers and practitioners.

This review article examines the challenges facing evolvable hardware research from its origins through the present day, and charts a path toward a promising future. Haddow and Tyrrell analyze why the field has struggled to move beyond proof-of-concept demonstrations into practical applications, identifying key technical and methodological challenges. The article covers topics including scalability, robustness, the gap between intrinsic and extrinsic evolution, and the relationship between evolvable hardware and conventional design methodologies. It provides a roadmap for addressing these challenges and revitalizing the field.

This book covers the basic theory, practical details and advanced research of the implementation of evolutionary methods on physical substrates, with most examples from electronic engineering applications including transistor-level design and system-level implementation. It provides an introduction to the field of evolvable hardware, covering the fundamental concepts and methods, and then moves on to more advanced topics such as the evolution of analog and digital circuits, the use of FPGAs, and the application of evolutionary methods to real-world problems.