Feasible evolutionary and self-repairing hardware by means of the dynamic reconfiguration capabilities of the FIPSOC devices

In this paper we shall address the paradigms of evolutionary and self-repairing hardware using a new family of programmable devices, called FIPSOC (Field Programmable System On a Chip). The most salient feature of these devices is the integration on a single chip of a programmable digital section, a programmable analog section and a general-purpose microcontroller. Furthermore, the programmable digital section has been designed including a flexible and fast dynamic reconfiguration scheme. These properties provide an efficient framework for tackling the specific features posed by the emerging field of evolutionary computation. We shall demonstrate this fact by means of two different case studies: a self-repairing strategy for digital systems, suitable for applications in environments exposed to radiation, and an efficient implementation scheme for evolving parallel cellular machines.