The main characteristic of Reconfigurable Computing is the presence of hardware that can be reconfigured to implement specific functionality more suitable for specially tailored hardware than on a simple uniprocessor. Reconfigurable computing systems join microprocessors and programmable hardware in order to take advantage of the combined strengths of hardware and software and have been used in applications ranging from embedded systems to high performance computing. Many of the fundamental theories have been identified and used by the Hardware/Software Co-Design research field. Although the same background ideas are shared in both areas, they have different goals and use different approaches.This book is intended as an introduction to the entire range of issues important to reconfigurable computing, using FPGAs as the context, or "computing vehicles" to implement this powerful technology. It will take a reader with a background in the basics of digital design and software programming and provide them with the knowledge needed to be an effective designer or researcher in this rapidly evolving field.

· Treatment of FPGAs as computing vehicles rather than glue-logic or ASIC substitutes
· Views of FPGA programming beyond Verilog/VHDL
· Broad set of case studies demonstrating how to use FPGAs in novel and efficient ways

Reconfigurable Computing: The Theory and Practice of FPGA-Based Computation

Digital Hardware Evolution.- An Online EHW Pattern Recognition System Applied to Sonar Spectrum Classification.- Design of Electronic Circuits Using a Divide-and-Conquer Approach.- Implementing Multi-VRC Cores to Evolve Combinational Logic Circuits in Parallel.- An Intrinsic Evolvable Hardware Based on Multiplexer Module Array.- Estimating Array Connectivity and Applying Multi-output Node Structure in Evolutionary Design of Digital Circuits.- Research on the Online Evaluation Approach for the Digital Evolvable Hardware.- Research on Multi-objective On-Line Evolution Technology of Digital Circuit Based on FPGA Model.- Evolutionary Design of Generic Combinational Multipliers Using Development.- Analog Hardware Evolution.- Automatic Synthesis of Practical Passive Filters Using Clonal Selection Principle-Based Gene Expression Programming.- Research on Fault-Tolerance of Analog Circuits Based on Evolvable Hardware.- Analog Circuit Evolution Based on FPTA-2.- Bio-inspired Systems.- Knowledge Network Management System with Medicine Self Repairing Strategy.- Design of a Cell in Embryonic Systems with Improved Efficiency and Fault-Tolerance.- Design on Operator-Based Reconfigurable Hardware Architecture and Cell Circuit.- Bio-inspired Systems with Self-developing Mechanisms.- Development of a Tiny Computer-Assisted Wireless EEG Biofeedback System.- Steps Forward to Evolve Bio-inspired Embryonic Cell-Based Electronic Systems.- Evolution of Polymorphic Self-checking Circuits.- Mechanical Hardware Evolution.- Sliding Algorithm for Reconfigurable Arrays of Processors.- System-Level Modeling and Multi-objective Evolutionary Design of Pipelined FFT Processors for Wireless OFDM Receivers.- Reducing the Area on a Chip Using a Bank of Evolved Filters.- Evolutionary Design.- Walsh Function Systems: The Bisectional Evolutional Generation Pattern.- Extrinsic Evolvable Hardware on the RISA Architecture.- Evolving and Analysing "Useful" Redundant Logic.- Adaptive Transmission Technique in Underwater Acoustic Wireless Communication.- Autonomous Robot Path Planning Based on Swarm Intelligence and Stream Functions.- Research on Adaptive System of the BTT-45 Air-to-Air Missile Based on Multilevel Hierarchical Intelligent Controller.- The Design of an Evolvable On-Board Computer.- Evolutionary Algorithms in Hardware Design.- Extending Artificial Development: Exploiting Environmental Information for the Achievement of Phenotypic Plasticity.- UDT-Based Multi-objective Evolutionary Design of Passive Power Filters of a Hybrid Power Filter System.- Designing Electronic Circuits by Means of Gene Expression Programming II.- Designing Polymorphic Circuits with Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Weighted Sum Method.- Robust and Efficient Multi-objective Automatic Adjustment for Optical Axes in Laser Systems Using Stochastic Binary Search Algorithm.- Minimization of the Redundant Sensor Nodes in Dense Wireless Sensor Networks.- Evolving in Extended Hamming Distance Space: Hierarchical Mutation Strategy and Local Learning Principle for EHW.- Hardware Implementation of Evolutionary Algorithms.- Adaptive and Evolvable Analog Electronics for Space Applications.- Improving Flexibility in On-Line Evolvable Systems by Reconfigurable Computing.- Evolutionary Design of Resilient Substitution Boxes: From Coding to Hardware Implementation.- A Sophisticated Architecture for Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization Utilizing High Performance DSP.- FPGA-Based Genetic Algorithm Kernel Design.- Using Systolic Technique to Accelerate an EHW Engine for Lossless Image Compression.

Evolvable systems : from biology to hardware : 7th International Conference, ICES 2007, Wuhan, China, September 21-23, 2007 : proceedings

Evolvable hardware (EHW) refers to self-reconfiguration hardware design, where the configuration is under the control of an evolutionary algorithm (EA). One of the main difficulties in using EHW to solve real-world problems is scalability, which limits the size of the circuit that may be evolved. This paper outlines a new type of decomposition strategy for EHW, the "generalized disjunction decomposition" (GDD), which allows the evolution of large circuits. The proposed method has been extensively tested, not only with multipliers and parity bit problems traditionally used in the EHW community, but also with logic circuits taken from the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) benchmark library and randomly generated circuits. In order to achieve statistically relevant results, each analyzed logic circuit has been evolved 100 times, and the average of these results is presented and compared with other EHW techniques. This approach is necessary because of the probabilistic nature of EA; the same logic circuit may not be solved in the same way if tested several times. The proposed method has been examined in an extrinsic EHW system using the (1+lambda) evolution strategy. The results obtained demonstrate that GDD significantly improves the evolution of logic circuits in terms of the number of generations, reduces computational time as it is able to reduce the required time for a single iteration of the EA, and enables the evolution of larger circuits never before evolved. In addition to the proposed method, a short overview of EHW systems together with the most recent applications in electrical circuit design is provided

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Generalized Disjunction Decomposition for Evolvable Hardware

Hardware security concerns such as intellectual property (IP) piracy and hardware Trojans have triggered research into circuit protection and malicious logic detection from various design perspectives. In this article, emerging technologies are investigated by leveraging their unique properties for applications in the hardware security domain. Security, for the first time, will be treated as one design metric for emerging nano-architecture. Five example circuit structures including camouflaging gates, polymorphic gates, current/voltage-based circuit protectors, and current-based XOR logic are designed to show the high efficiency of silicon nanowire FETs and graphene SymFET in applications such as circuit protection and IP piracy prevention. Simulation results indicate that highly efficient and secure circuit structures can be achieved via the use of non-CMOS devices.

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Emerging Technology-Based Design of Primitives for Hardware Security

In this paper, a new circuit architecture for image filter evolution is proposed. The evolvable system is based on the implementation of a search algorithm in the PowerPC processor which is available in Xilinx Virtex II Pro Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Candidate filters are evaluated in a domain-specific virtual reconfigurable circuit implemented using a reconfigurable logic of the same FPGA. As the PowerPC processor enables to execute more sophisticated search algorithms than an original solely circuit-based solution by Martinek and Sekanina, a higher performance can be obtained. In the FPGA, a resulting human-competitive filter can be evolved in 15 sec in average.

An evolvable hardware system in Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA

Polymorphic gates can be considered as a new reconfigurable technology capable of integrating logic functions with sensing in a single compact structure. Polymorphic gates whose logic function can be controlled by the level of the power supply voltage (Vdd) represent a special class of polymorphic gates. A new polymorphic NAND/NOR gate controlled by Vdd is presented. This gate was fabricated and utilized in a self-checking polymorphic adder. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of this novel implementation.

Physical Demonstration of Polymorphic Self-Checking Circuits

In this paper, a new reconfigurable polymorphic chip (REPOMO32) is introduced. This chip has been developed in order to investigate the electrical properties of polymorphic circuits and demonstrate the applications of polymorphic electronics. REPOMO32 contains an array of 32 configurable logic elements; each of them can perform the AND, OR, XOR and polymorphic NAND/NOR function which is controlled by the level of the power supply voltage. REPOMO32 parameters are reported together with the analysis of polymorphic circuits implemented and evolved in REPOMO32. Potential applications of the chip are also discussed.

REPOMO32 - New reconfigurable polymorphic integrated circuit for adaptive hardware

The paper deals with a class of image filters in which the evolutionary approach consistently produces excellent and innovative results. Furthermore, a method is proposed that leads to the automatic design of easily testable circuits. In particular we evolved "salt and pepper" noise filters, random shot noise filters, Gaussian noise filters, uniform random noise filters, and edge detectors.

Easily testable image operators: the class of circuits where evolution beats engineers

Polymorphic digital circuits are circuits composed of polymorphic (multifunctional) as well as ordinary gates. In addition to its standard logic function (such as NAND), a polymorphic gate exhibits another logic function which is activated under a specific condition, for example, when Vdd, temperature, illumination or a special signal reaches a certain level. This paper describes existing polymorphic gates and their features, benefits and limits and discusses special class of polymorphic gates - bifunctional polymorphic gates controlled by a special signal. These gates seem to be most flexible polymorphic gates. In the paper a new two-input bifunctional gate for polymorphic circuits is proposed. The gate produces NAND or XOR function according to a special signal. The proposed gate is effective in terms of area overhead - it consists of 9 transistors only, while corresponding circuit employing conventional gates consists of more than 10 transistors.

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On bifunctional polymorphic gates controlled by a special signal

A polymorphic FIR filter is proposed which can operate in two modes. The first mode is considered as a standard mode in which the filter performs a normal operation. In the second mode, the filter operates with reduced power supply voltage (Vdd), some filter coefficients are reconfigured (as response to the change of the polymorphic gates function which is controlled by Vdd) and some parts of the filter are disconnected. Experimental results indicate that while power consumption can significantly be reduced when half of the taps is suspended the filter is still able to achieve a reasonable quality of filtering.

Richard Ruzicka

Papers

Physical Demonstration of Polymorphic Self-Checking Circuits

REPOMO32 - New reconfigurable polymorphic integrated circuit for adaptive hardware

Easily testable image operators: the class of circuits where evolution beats engineers

On bifunctional polymorphic gates controlled by a special signal

Polymorphic FIR Filters with Backup Mode Enabling Power Savings