Evolution of CMOS circuits in simulations and directly in hardware on a programmable chip
Adrian Stoica, Carlos-Salazar Lazaro, Didier Keymeulen, Ken J. Hayworth · 1999
The paper introduces an approach to automated synthesis of CMOS circuits, based on evolution on a Programmable Transistor Array (PTA). The PTA is a reconfigurable architecture that allows evolutionary synthesis in simulations as well as on a reconfigurable chip implementing the PTA. Thus, the PTA allows, for the first time, analog circuits obtained by evolutionary design to be immediately validated in hardware on the programmable PTA chip. The paper describes a software experiment showing evolutionary synthesis of a circuit with a desired DC characteristic. The hardware implementation of a PTA chip is then described, and the same evolutionary experiment is performed directly on the chip demonstrating circuit synthesis/self-configuration in hardware. The experiment shows that some solutions obtained in simulated evolutions may not be valid when programmed in hardware. 1