Evolvable Hardware Systems and Fault Tolerance Strategies
Summary
Evolvable hardware systems integrate reconfigurable architectures with evolutionary algorithms to design, optimise and adapt electronic circuits autonomously. By harnessing bio-inspired search processes, such systems can discover novel hardware configurations that meet performance, power and reliability criteria without manual intervention. Fault tolerance strategies in this domain range from redundancy and self-repair mechanisms to dynamic reconfiguration, enabling continued operation amidst component failures or environmental perturbations. Recent advances have focused on improving evolutionary efficiency, reducing resource overhead and enhancing self-adaptive repair processes. Collectively, these developments underscore the potential of evolvable hardware to deliver resilient computing platforms for applications spanning robotics, nanotechnology and embedded systems.
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Evolvable Hardware Systems and Fault Tolerance Strategies publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in evolvable hardware systems and fault tolerance strategies across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Evolvable hardware: A reconfigurable electronic system whose structure and parameters are autonomously generated by evolutionary algorithms.
Evolutionary algorithm: An optimisation method that mimics natural selection by iteratively evolving a population of candidate solutions through mutation, recombination and selection.
Field-programmable gate array (FPGA): A semiconductor device that can be reconfigured post-manufacture to implement custom logic circuits.
Fault tolerance: The capacity of a system to continue correct operation despite the presence of component failures or errors.
Simulated annealing: A probabilistic search technique inspired by the physical annealing process, used to avoid local optima in complex optimisation problems.
Self-repairing hardware: A hardware architecture capable of detecting faults and reconfiguring itself to restore functionality without external intervention.
References
- Hardware Evolution Based on Improved Simulated Annealing Algorithm in Cyclone V FPSoCs. IEEE Access (2020).
- A comparison of an evolvable hardware controller with an artificial neural network used for evolving the gait of a hexapod robot. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (2023).
- Dynamic Placement Optimization for Bio-Inspired Self-Repairing Hardware. IEEE Access (2020).
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