Abstract
In this chapter, the main ideas of the book are seen in action. The configuration of an FPGA is placed under the direct control of unconstrained intrinsic hardware evolution, and evolved for a simple but non-trivial task. Evolution solves the problem well, using a surprisingly small region of the FPGA, with rich structure and dynamics; it is demonstrated that unusual aspects of the semiconductor physics are exploited. When first reported (Thompson, 1996c), this was the first case of the intrinsic evolution of an FPGA configuration.1
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The material in this chapter also appears in Thompson (1997a).
TECHNICAL ELECTRONICS NOTES: All of the electronics fits comfortably on a single wire-wrapped ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) card (Figure 5.2), and was designed and constructed by the author for this project. The analogue integrator was of the basic op-amp/resistor/capacitor type, with a MOSFET to reset it to zero (Horowitz & Hill, 1989). A MC68HC11A0 micro-controller operated this reset signal (and that of the FPGA), and performed 8-bit A/D conversion on the integrator output. A final accuracy of 16 bits in the integrator reading was obtained by summing (in software) the result of integration over 256 sub-intervals, with an A/D conversion followed by a resetting of the analogue integrator performed after each sub-interval. The same micro-controller was responsible for the generation of the tones. Locations in the configuration memory of the FPGA and in the dual-port RAM used by the the micro-controller could be read and written by the PC via some registers mapped into the ISA-Bus I/O space. The XC6216 requires some small but non-trivial circuitry to allow this; the schematics are subject to change (a β-test chip was used in this work), so are not included here, but are available from the author.
It has been suggested (Johnson, 1996) that ‘The Laws of Form’ (Spencer-Brown, 1969) could help in the analysis of this type of circuit. This is currently an unsubstantiated possibility.
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© 1998 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Thompson, A. (1998). Demonstration. In: Hardware Evolution. Distinguished Dissertations. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3414-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3414-5_5
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-3416-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-3414-5
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