HERA Project's Holistic Evolutionary Framework

Research efforts in Evolvable Hardware allowed to prove how it is possible to adopt a radically alternative approach to the synthesis of hardware circuits by drawing inspiration from natural selection and evolution. In order to move these achievements to a new level, however, we need more sophisticated tools and upport for experimenting with new structures and devices. This paper moves a first step in this direction by presenting our proposal for a holistic evolutionary framework, able to provide simple yet powerful abstractions o unify a variety of evolutionary architectures under the same comprehensive ramework. This way, we allow to reuse a finely-tuned evolutionary infrastructure for any kind of architecture using our general model. Additional contribution of this work is the design and evaluation, within the holistic framework, of a novel flexible FPGA-based evolutionary architecture which dispenses from the need of relying on the internal configuration access port, which proved to be a serious bottleneck in previous work.