Promises and Challenges of Evolvable Hardware

Evolvable hardware (EHW) has attracted increasing attention since the early 1990’s with the advent of easily reconfigurable hardware, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGA’s). It promises to provide an entirely new approach to complex electronic circuit design and new adaptive hardware. EHW has been demonstrated to be able to perform a wide range of tasks from pattern recognition to adaptive control. However, there are still many fundamental issues in EHW that remain open. This paper reviews the current status of EHW, discusses the promises and possible advantages of EHW, and indicates the challenges we must meet in order to develop practical and large-scale EHW.