Evolutionary Electronics
At Sussex
The University of Sussex

Artificial evolution, such as a Genetic Algorithm, has many promising applications in electronics. These range from using it as an optimisation technique as part of a fairly conventional VLSI synthesis pathway, through to using it to design automatically circuits that could be of a very different nature to the way electronics is normally envisaged. We also apply our philosophy of artificial evolution to other domains of design: we seek to find ways of allowing evolution to explore areas of the "design space" not normally accessible.

Lead Researcher:

  • Adrian Thompson
  • Working closely with Phil Husbands  and Inman Harvey
    • Collaborators and alumni:
  • Miguel Garvie Evolution of self-checking digital circuits using distributed processing across the internet; evolution for self-repair of RAM-based FPGA systems on long-term space missions. Includes Java software for the distributed genetic algorithm.
  • Paul Layzell Now at HP, but click here for information on his past and ongoing hardware evolution work in concert with the Sussex group. This includes full details of the `evolvable motherboard'.
  • Ricardo Salem Zebulum
    • Some other completed Projects:
  • Sverre Vigander's dissertation: `Evolutionary fault repair of electronics in space applications'
  • EPSRC 3-year project `Artificial Evolution of Parallel Distributed Electronic Circuits Directly Exploiting Reconfigurable Hardware'. Summary.
  • Sam Woolf's MSc Thesis on an interactive artwork utilising reconfigurable hardware.
  • Ian Ozsvald's MSc Thesis on evolution for the Zetex TRAC device.
    • LINKS PAGE: Click here for links to other researchers in the field.

    We gratefully acknowledge the support of the following organisations, who's support of our research is a huge help: EPSRC, British Telecom, CAPES (Brazil), Xilinx, Hewlett Packard, Motorola Programmable Technology Centre, Zetex.

    For the sake of search-engines, we should mention that this field is variously known as: Hardware Evolution, Evolvable Hardware (EHW, E-Hard), Evolutionary Electronics, EvolWare, bio-inspired electronics.

    We co-organised the International Conference on Evolvable Systems 2000. It was good.
    Read it in this book.

    Maintained by Adrian Thompson
    Up to the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics
    Up to the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group
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